There was once a gardener. Not only was, but in all probability is, for as far as I know you may meet him to this day. There are no death-bed scenes in this book. The gardener was not the sort of person to bring a novel to a graceful climax by dying finally in an atmosphere of elevated immorality. He was extremely thin, but not in the least unhealthy. He never with his own consent ran any risk of sudden death. Nobody would ever try to introduce him into a real book, for he was in no way suitable. He was not a philosopher. Not an adventurer. Not a gay dog. Not lively: but he lived, and that at least is a great merit. In appearance the gardener was a fairly mediocre study in black and white. He had a white and wooden face, black hair as smooth as a wet seal’s back, thin arms and legs, and enormous hands and feet. He was not indispensable to any one, but he believed that he was a pillar supporting the world. It sometimes makes one nervous to reflect what very amateur pillars the world seems to employ.
2He lived in a boarding-house in Penny Street, W. A boarding-house is a place full of talk, it has as many eyes as a peacock, and ears to correspond. It is lamentably little, and yet impossible to ignore. It is not a dignified foundation for a pillar.
The gardener was twenty-three. Twenty-three is said to be the prime of life by those who have reached so far and no farther. It shares this distinction with every age, from ten to three-score and ten.
On the first of June, in his twenty-fourth year, the gardener broke his boot-lace. The remains of the catastrophe dangled from his hand. String was out of the question; one cannot be decent dressed in string, he thought, with that touch of exaggeration common to victims of disasters. The world was a sordid and sardonic master, there was no heart in the breast of Fate. He was bereft even of his dignity, there is no dignity in the death of a boot-lace. The gardener’s twenty-three years were stripped from him like a cloak. He felt little and naked.
He was so busy with his emotions that he had forgotten that the door of his room was open.
It was rather like the girl Courtesy to stand on the landing boldly staring in at a man sitting on his bedroom floor crushed by circumstances. She had no idea of what was fitting. Any other woman would have recognised the presence of despair, and would have passed by with head averted.
But the girl Courtesy said, “Poor lamb, has it broken its boot-lace?”
3The gardener continued in silence to watch the strangling of his vanity by the corpse of the boot-lace. His chief characteristic was a whole heart in all that he did.
A tear should have appeared in Courtesy’s eye at the sight of him. But it did not.
“Give me the boot,” she said, advancing into the room in the most unwomanly manner. And she knotted the boot-lace with a cleverness so unexpected—considering the sort of girl she was—that the difference in its length was negligible, and the knot was hidden beneath the other lace.
“Women have their uses,” thought the gardener. But the thought was short-lived, for Courtesy’s next remark was:
“There, boy, run along and keep smilin’. Somebody loves you.” And she patted him on the cheek.
Now it has been made clear that the gardener was a Man of Twenty-three. He turned his back violently on the woman, put on his boot, and walked downstairs bristling with dignity.
The girl Courtesy not only failed to be cut to the heart by the silent rebuke, but she failed to realise that she had offended. She was rather fat, and rather obtuse. She was half an inch taller than the gardener, and half a dozen years older.
The gardener’s indignation rode him downstairs. It spurred him to force his hat down on his head at a most unbecoming angle, it supplied the impetus for a passionate slamming of the door. But on the 4door-step it evaporated suddenly. It was replaced by a rosy and arresting thought.
“Poor soul, she loves me,” said the gardener. He adjusted his hat, and stepped out into London, a breaker of hearts, a Don Juan, unconscious of his charm yet conscious of his unconsciousness. “Poor thing, poor thing,” he thought, and remembered with regret that Courtesy had not lost her appetite. On the contrary, she had been looking even plumper of late. But then Courtesy never quite played the game.
“I begin to be appreciated,” reflected the gardener. “I always knew the world would find out some day....”
The gardener was a dreamer of dreams, and a weaver of many theories. His theories were not even tangible enough to make a philosophy, yet against them he measured his world. And any shortcomings he placed to the world’s account. He wrapped himself in theories to such an extent that facts were crowded from his view, he posed until he lost himself in a wilderness of poses. He was not the victim of consistency, that most ambiguous virtue. The dense and godly wear consistency as a flower, the imaginative fling it joyfully behind them.
Imagination seems to be a glory and a misery, a blessing and a curse. Adam, to his sorrow, lacked it. Eve, to her sorrow, possessed it. Had both been blessed—or cursed—with it, there would have been much keener competition for the apple.
5The million eyes of female London pricked the gardener, or so he imagined, as he threaded the Strand. He felt as if a glance from his eye was a blessing, and he bestowed it generously. The full blaze of it fell upon one particular girl as she walked towards him. She seemed to the gardener to be almost worthy. Her yellow hair suffered from Marcelle spasms at careful intervals of an inch and a half, every possible tooth enjoyed publicity. The gardener recognised a kindred soul. A certain shade of yellow hair always at this period thatched a kindred soul for the gardener.
He followed the lady.
He followed her even into the gaping jaws of an underground station. There she bought cigarettes at a tobacco stall.
“She smokes,” thought the gardener. “This is life.”
He went close to her while she paid. She was not in the least miserly of a certain cheap smell of violets. The gardener was undaunted.
“Shall we take a taxi, Miss?” he suggested, his wide eager smile a trifle damped by self-consciousness. For this was his first attempt of the kind. “They say Kew is lovely just now.”
It was his theory that spoke. In practice he had but threepence in his pocket.
She replied, “Bless you, kid. Run ’ome to mammy, do.”
Her voice sounded like the scent she wore. It 6had a hard tone which somehow brought the solitary threepence to mind.
The gardener returned at great speed to Penny Street.
It was lunch-time at Number Twenty-one. The eternal hash approached its daily martyrdom. Hash is a worthy thing, but it reminds you that you are not at the Ritz. There is nothing worse calculated to make you forget a lonely threepenny bit in your pocket.
The gardener had a hundred a year. He was apparently the only person in London with a hundred a year, for wherever he went he always found himself the wealthiest person present. His friends gave his natural generosity a free rein. After various experiments in social economy, he found it cheapest to rid himself of the hundred a year immediately on its quarterly appearance, and live on his expectations for the rest of the time. There are drawbacks about this plan, as well as many advantages. But the gardener was a pillar, and he found it easier to support the world than to support himself.
It was on this occasion that his neighbour at luncheon, unaware of his pillar-hood, asked him what he was doing for a living.
“Living,” replied the gardener. He was not absolutely sure that it made sense, but it sounded epigrammatic. He was, in some lights, a shameless prig. But then one often is, if one thinks, at twenty-three.
7“It’s all living,” he continued to his neighbour. “It’s all life. Being out of a job is life. Being kicked is life. Starving’s life. Dying’s life.”
The neighbour did not reply because he was busy eating. One had to keep one’s attention fixed on the food problem at 21 Penny Street. There was no time for epigrams. It was a case of the survival of the most silent. The gardener was very thin.
The girl Courtesy, however, was one who could do two things at once. She could support life and impart information at the same time.
“I do believe you talk for the sake of talking,” she said; and it was true. “How can dying be living?”
It is most annoying to have the cold light of feminine logic turned on to an impromptu epigram. The gardener pushed the parsnips towards her as a hint that she was talking too much. But Courtesy had the sort of eye that sees no subtlety in parsnips. Her understanding was of the black and white type.
“Death is the door to life,” remarked Miss Shakespeare, nailing down the golden opportunity with eagerness. 21 Penny Street very rarely gave Miss Shakespeare the satisfaction of such an opening. There was, however, a lamentable lack of response. The subject, which had been upheld contrary to the laws of gravitation, fell heavily to earth.
“Is this your threepenny bit or mine?” asked the girl Courtesy. For that potent symbol, the victim 8of its owner’s absence of mind, in the course of violent exercise between the gardener’s plate and hers, had fallen into her lap.
Whose idea was it to make money round? I sometimes feel certain I could control it better if it were square.
“It is mine,” said the gardener, still posing as a philosopher. “A little splinter out of the brimstone lake. Feel it.”
Courtesy smelt it without repulsion.
“Talk again,” she said. “Where would you be without money?”
“Where would I be without money? Where would I be without any of the vices? Singing in Paradise, I suppose.”
“If I pocket this threepenny bit,” said Courtesy, that practical girl, “what will you say?”
“Thank you—and good-bye,” replied the gardener. “It is my last link with the world.”
Courtesy put it in her purse. “Good-bye,” she said. “So sorry you must go. Reserve a halo for me.”
The gardener rose immediately and walked upstairs with decision into his bedroom, which, by some freak of chance, was papered blue to match his soul. It was indeed the anteroom of the gardener’s soul. Nightly he went through it into the palace of himself.
He took out of it now his toothbrush, a change of raiment, and Hilda. It occurs to me that I have 9not yet mentioned Hilda. She was a nasturtium in a small pot.
On his way downstairs he met Miss Shakespeare, who held the destinies of 21 Penny Street, and did not hold with the gardener’s unexpected ways.
“Your weekly account ...” she began.
“I have left everything I have as hostages with fate,” said the gardener. “When I get tired of Paradise I’ll come back.”
On the door-step he exclaimed, “I will be a merry vagabond, tra-la-la ...” and he stepped out transfigured—in theory.
As he passed the dining-room window he caught sight of the red of Courtesy’s hair, as she characteristically continued eating.
“An episode,” he thought. “Unscathed I pass on. And the woman, as women must, remains to weep and grow old. Courtesy, my little auburn lover, I have passed on—for ever.”
But he had to return two minutes later to fetch a pocket-handkerchief from among the hostages. And Courtesy, as she met him in the hall, nodded in an unsuitably unscathed manner.
The gardener walked, with Hilda in his hand. It became night. Practically speaking, it is of course impossible for night to occur within three paragraphs of luncheon-time. But actually the day is often to me as full of holes as a Gruyère cheese.
To the gardener the beginnings of a walk which he felt sure must eventually find a place in history 10were torn ruthlessly out of his experience. He was thinking about red hair, and all things red.
He hoped that Hilda, when she flowered, would be the exact shade of a certain head of hair he had lately seen.
“Hoping and planning for Hilda like a mother-to-be,” he thought, but that pose was impossible to sustain.
Red hair.
He did not think of the girl Courtesy at all. Only her hair flamed in his memory. The remembrance of the rest of her was as faint and lifeless as a hairdresser’s dummy.
It struck him that auburn, with orange lights in the sunlight, was the colour of heat, the colour of heaven, the colour of life and love. He looked round at the characteristic London female passer-by, the thin-breasted girl, with hair the colour of wet sand, and reflected that Woman is a much rarer creature than she appears to be.
He recovered consciousness in Kensington Gardens at dusk. He remembered that he was a merry vagabond.
“Tra-la-la ...” he sang as he passed a park-keeper.
People in authority seem as a rule to be shy of the pose. The park-keeper was not exactly shy, but he made a murmured protest against the Tra-la-la, and saw the gardener to the gate with most offensive care.
11In theory the gardener spent the night at the Ritz. In practice he slept on the Embankment. He was a man of luck in little things, and the night was the first fine night for several weeks. The gardener followed the moon in its light fall across the sky. Several little stars followed it too, in and out of the small smiling clouds.
The moon threaded its way in and out of the gardener’s small smiling dreams. Oh mad moon, you porthole, looking up into a fantastic Paradise!
The gardener did not dream of red hair. That subject was exhausted.
When an undecided sun blinked through smoked glasses at the Thames, and at the little steamers sleeping with their funnels down like sea-gulls on the water with their heads under their wings, the gardener rose. He had a bath and a shave—in theory—and walked southward. Tra-la-la.
He walked very fast when he got beyond the tramways, but after a while a woman who was walking behind him caught him up. Women are apt to get above themselves in these days, I think.
“I’m going to walk with you,” said the woman.
“Why?” asked the gardener, who spent some ingenuity in saying the thing that was unexpected, whether possible or impossible.
“Because you’re carrying that flower-pot,” replied the woman. “It’s such absurd sort of luggage to be taking on a journey.”
12“How do you know I’m going on a journey?” asked the gardener, astonished at meeting his match. “By the expression of your heels.”
The gardener could think of nothing more apt to say than “Tra-la-la ...” so he said it, to let her know that he was a merry vagabond.
The woman was quite plain, and therefore worthy only of invisibility in the eyes of a self-respecting young man. She had the sort of hair that plays truant over the ears, but has not vitality enough to do it prettily. Her complexion was not worthy of the name. Her eyes made no attempt to redeem her plainness, which is the only point of having eyes in fiction. Her only outward virtue was that she did not attempt to dress as if she were pretty. And even this is not a very attractive virtue.
She carried a mustard-coloured portmanteau.
“I know what you are,” said the gardener. “You are a suffragette, going to burn a house down.”
The woman raised her eyebrows.
“How curious of you!” she said. “You are perfectly right. Votes for women!”
“Tra-la-la ...” sang the gardener wittily.
(You need not be afraid. There is not going to be so very much about the cause in this book.)
They walked some way in silence. The gardener, of course, shared the views of all decent men on this subject. One may virtuously destroy life in a good cause, but to destroy property is a heinous crime, whatever its motive.
13(Yes, I know that made you tremble, but there are not many more paragraphs of it.)
Presently they passed a car, pillowed against a grassy bank. Its attitude, which looked depressed, was not the result of a catastrophe, but of a picnic. In the meadow, among the buttercups, could be seen four female hats leaning together over a little square meal set forth in the grass.
“Look,” said the suffragette, in a voice thin with scorn.
The gardener looked, but could see nothing that aroused in him a horror proportionate to his companion’s tone.
“Listen,” said the suffragette half an octave higher.
The gardener listened. But all he heard was, “Oh, my dear, it was too killing....”
Then, because the chauffeur on the bank paused in mid-sandwich, as if about to rebuke their curiosity, they walked on.
“One is born a woman,” said the suffragette. “A woman in her sphere—which is the home. One starts by thinking of one’s dolls, later one thinks about one’s looks, and later still about one’s clothes. But nobody marries one. And then one finds that one’s sphere—which is the home—has been a prison all along. Has it ever struck you that the tragedy of a woman’s life is that she has time to think—she can think and organise her sphere at the same time. Her work never lets her get away from herself. 14I tell you I have cried with disgust at the sound of my own name—I won’t give it to you, but it might as well be Jane Brown. I have gasped appalled at the banality of my Sunday hat. Yet I kept house excellently. And now I have run away, I am living a wide and gorgeous life of unwomanliness. I am trying to share your simplest privilege—the privilege you were born to through no merit of your own, you silly little boy—the privilege of having interests as wide as the world if you like, and of thinking to some purpose about England’s affairs. My England. Are you any Englisher than I?”
“You are becoming incoherent,” said the gardener. “You are enjoying a privilege which you do not share with me—the privilege of becoming hysterical in public and yet being protected by the law. You are a woman, and goodness knows that is privilege enough. It covers everything except politics. Also you have wandered from the point, which at one time appeared to be a picnic.”
(Courage. There is only a little more of this. But you must allow the woman the privilege of the last word. It is always more dignified to allow her what she is perfectly certain to take in any case.)
“The picnic was an example of that sphere of which ‘Oh, my dear, too killing ...’ is the motto. You educate women—to that. I might have been under one of those four hats—only I’m not pretty enough. You have done nothing to prevent it. I 15might have been an ‘Oh, my dear’ girl, but thank heaven I’m an incendiary instead.”
That was the end of that argument. The gardener could not reply as his heart prompted him, because the arguments that pressed to his lips were too obvious.
Obviousness was the eighth deadly sin in his eyes. He would have agreed with the Devil rather than use the usual arguments in favour of virtue. That was his one permanent pose.
A little way off, on a low green hill, the suffragette pointed out the home of a scion of sweated industry, the house she intended to burn down. High trees bowed to each other on either side of it, and a little chalky white road struggled up to its door through fir plantations, like you or me climbing the world for a reward we never see.
“I’m sorry,” said the gardener. “I love a house that looks up as that one does. I don’t like them when they sit conceitedly surveying their ‘well-timbered acres’ under beetle brows that hide the sky. Don’t burn it. Look at it, holding up its trees like green hands full of blessings.”
“In an hour or two the smoke will stand over it like a tree—like a curse....”
When they parted the gardener liked her a little because she was on the wrong side of the law. There is much more room for the wind to blow and the sun to shine beyond the pale—or so it seems to the gardener and me standing wistful and respectable 16inside. It is curious to me that one of the few remaining illusions of romance should cling to a connection with that most prosy of all institutions—the law.
I forgot to mention that the gardener borrowed a shilling from the suffragette, thus rashly forming a new link with the world in place of the one he had relinquished to the girl Courtesy. The worst of the world is that it remains so absurdly conservative, and rudely ignores our interesting changes of pose and of fantasy. I have been known to crave for a penny bun in the middle of a visit from my muse, and that is not my fault, but Nature’s, who created appetites and buns for the common herd, and refused to adapt herself to my abnormal psychology.
It was interesting to the gardener to see how easily the suffragette parted with such an important thing as a shilling. Superfluity is such an incredible thing to the hungry. The suffragette gave Holloway Gaol as her permanent address.
Thus accidentally bribed, the gardener, feasting on a cut from the joint in the next village, refrained from discussing women, their rights or wrongs, or their local intentions, with the village policeman. “She won’t really dare do it,” he thought.
(I may here add that I was not asked by a militant society to write this book. I am writing it for your instruction and my own amusement.)
The gardener did not sleep under a hedge as all merry vagabonds do—(Tra-la-la)—but he slept 17in the very middle of a large field, much to the surprise of the cows. One or two of these coffee-coloured matrons awoke him at dawn by means of an unwinking examination that would have put a lesser man out of countenance. But the gardener, as becomes a man attacked by the empty impertinences of females, turned the other way and presently slept again.
He washed next morning near to where the cows drank. He had no soap and the cows had no tumblers,—nothing could have been more elemental than either performance.
“I am very near to the heart of nature—tra-la-la,” trilled the gardener. But the heart of nature eludes him who tries to measure the distance. The only beat that the gardener heard was the soft thud of his own feet along the thick dust of the highway.
About the next day but one he came to a place where the scenery changed its mind abruptly, flung buttercups and beeches behind it, and drew over its shoulders the sombre cloak of heather and pines.
Under an unremarkable pine tree, listening to the impatient summons of the woodpecker (who, I think, is the feathered soul of the foolish virgin outside the bridegroom’s door), sat a man. He was so fair that he might as well have been white-haired. His eyes were like two copper sequins set between white lashes, beneath white brows, in a white face. His lips were very red, and if he had seemed more detached and less friendly, he would have looked 18like harlequin. But he rose from his seat on the pine needles, and came towards the gardener, as though he had been waiting for him.
The gardener steeled himself against the stranger’s first word, fearing lest he should say, “What a glorious day!”
But the stranger, making a spasmodic attempt to remove a hat which had been left at home, said, “My name is Samuel Rust, a hotel-keeper. Won’t you come and look at my place?”
It was impossible for the gardener to do otherwise, for Mr. Samuel Rust’s place framed itself in a gap in the woods to the right, and was introduced by a wave of its owner’s hand.
“What a red place!” said the gardener.
“Of course. No other name is possible for it,” said Mr. Rust.
The house was built of red brick that had much tangerine colour in it. The flowering heather surged to its very door-step. And thick around it the slim pine tree-trunks shot up, like flame, whispered flame.
The gardener smiled at it. If only Hilda might be the colour of those tree-trunks when she flowered.
Mr. Rust acknowledged the smile in the name of his red place. “It’s an—inoffensive little hole,” he said.
What he meant was of course, “It’s a perfectly exquisite spot.” What is becoming of our old eloquence and enthusiasm? The full-blooded conventions 19are dying, and we have already replaced them by a code of shadows. But whether the life beneath the code is as vivid as ever, remains to be seen. I think myself that manners are changing, but not man. In all probability we shall live to greet the day when “fairly decent” will express the most ecstatic degree of rapture.
The gardener was not intentionally modern. It is the tendency of his generation to be modern—it is difficult to believe that it has been the tendency of every generation from the prehistoric downwards. And it was the gardener’s ambition to walk in the opposite direction to the tendency of his generation. He shared the common delusion that by walking apart he could be unique. This arises from the divine fallacy that man makes man, that he has the making of himself in his own hands.
I am glad that I share this pathetic illusion with my gardener.
So, as he thought the Red Place very beautiful, he said, “I think it is very beautiful.”
But even so he was not sincere throughout. He posed even in his honesty. For he posed purposely as an honest man.
Of course you know that one of the most effective poses is to pose as one who never poses. A rough diamond with a heart of gold.
The first moment Mr. Samuel Rust heard the gardener say Tra-la-la he ceased to have a doubt as to the species of citadel he had invaded.
20“You are one of these insouciant wanderers, what?” he suggested. “A light-hearted genius going to make a fortune grow out of the twopence in your pocket. You got yourself out of a book. I think your sort make your hearts light by blowing them up with gas.”
True to his code, he then feared that he had spoken with insufficient mediocrity, and blushed. A small circular patch of red, like a rose, appeared high up on either cheek, suddenly bringing the rest of his face into competition with his vivid lips.
“You are wrong about the twopence,” said the gardener, “I have three halfpence.”
“Come and see my Red Place,” said Mr. Rust. “That is, if you’re not bored.”
Boredom and the gardener were strangers. One can never be bored if one is always busy creating oneself with all the range of humanity as model.
“This is an hotel,” said the owner, as they approached the door. “It is my hotel, and it promised to make my fortune. So far it has confined itself to costing a fortune. When I remind it of its promise it puts its tongue in its cheek—what?”
The northern side of the Red Place was quite different in character from the side which first smiled on the gardener. This was because one essential detail was lacking—the heather. Fire had passed over the little space at some recent date in its sleepy history, and had left it sinister. Tortured roots 21and branches appealed from the black ground to a blue heaven. The surrounding pine trees, with their feet charred and blistered, and their higher limbs still fiercely red, still looked like flames now turned into pillars of delight in answer to the prayer of the beseeching heather.
“Is there anybody in your hotel?” asked the gardener, smoothing his hair hopefully—the young man’s invariable prelude to romance.
“Nobody, except the gods,” replied the host. “We sit here waiting, the divine and I. There is a blessing on the place, and I intend to make money out of it. You can see for yourself how wonderfully good it is. If people knew of the peace and the delight.... The table is excellent too—I am the chef as well as the proprietor. Our terms are most moderate.”
“All the same you need advertisement,” said the gardener, who, in unguarded moments, was more modern than he knew. “I can imagine most sensational advertising of a place with such a pronounced blessing on it. Buy up the front page of the Daily Mail, and let’s compose a series of splashes.”
“I am penniless,” began Mr. Rust dramatically, and interrupted himself. “A slight tendency towards financial inadequacy—what?”
“I have three halfpence,” said the gardener, but not hopefully.
“Come in for the night,” begged the host. “I have twelve bedrooms for you to sleep in, and three 22bathrooms tiled in red. Terms a halfpenny, tout compris.”
“Tra-la-la ...” trilled the gardener, for as he followed his host the heather tingled and tossed beneath his feet, and the gods came out to meet him with a red welcome.
“You have nothing to do—what?” said Mr. Samuel Rust, when they were sitting in the high russet hall.
“We-ll ...” answered the gardener, feeling that the suggestion of failure lurked there. “I am a rover, you know. Busy roving.”
“To say that shows you haven’t roved sixty miles yet. When you’ve roved six hundred you’ll see there’s nothing to be got out of roving. When you’ve roved six thousand you’ll join the Travellers’ Club and be glad it’s all over.”
“Six thousand miles ...” said the gardener, as if it were a prayer. His heart looked and leapt towards the long, crowded perspective that those words hinted.
“You’ve never been to sea,” continued Mr. Samuel. And the gardener discovered with a jerk that he was a blue man born for the sea, and that he had never yet felt the swing of blue water beneath his feet.
“No,” he said, “I believe I must go there now.”
And he jumped to his feet.
“If you stay here for the night,” said Mr. Rust, “to-morrow I’ll suggest to you something that—may 23possibly interest you to some slight extent.”
With a clumsy blood-red pottery candlestick, which was so careless in detail as to seem to be the unconscious production of a drunken master-potter, the gardener found his room.
(I know it is a shock to you to find it bedtime at this point, but the gardener and I forgot to notice those parts of the day which I have not mentioned.)
He dreamt of red hair, redder than natural, as red as a sunset, seen at close quarters from Paradise. At midnight he awoke, in the clutch of perfectly irrelevant thoughts.
The room was a velvet cube, with the window plastered at one side of it, a spangled square. And the silken moonlight was draped across the floor.
“I am myself,” said the gardener. “I am my world. Nothing matters except me. I am the creator and the created.”
With which happy thought he returned to sleep again.
The Red Place lost its flame-like life at night. Night, that blind angel, has no dealings with colour, and turns even the auburn of the pine-trunks to cold silver. But before the gardener awoke again, the sun had roused the gods of the place to discover the theft of their red gold, and to replace it.
The gardener, as he trilled like a lark in one of the red-tiled bathrooms, was suddenly reminded that he was a merry vagabond.
“I must disappear,” he thought. “No true vagabond 24ever says, ‘Good-bye, and thank you for my pleasant visit.’”
So he prepared to disappear. From his bedroom window he could see, as he dressed, the pale head of Mr. Samuel Rust on a far fir-crowned slope, looking away over the green land towards London, waiting, side by side with the divine.
The gardener took three slices of dry bread from the breakfast which waited expectantly on a table in the hall, and went out. But under a gorse bush amongst the heather, he found some tiny scarlet flowers. He picked two or three, and returning put them on the breakfast plate of Mr. Samuel Rust. He put a halfpenny there too.
“Very vagabondish—tra-la-la ...” he murmured tunefully, and studied the infinitesimal effect with his head on one side.
Then he disappeared. He did it straightforwardly along the open road, as the best vagabonds do, and he was pleased with his fidelity to the part.
Presently he recalled for the first time Mr. Samuel Rust’s promise of a happy suggestion for that morning. For a moment he wondered, for a second he regretted, but he posed as being devoid of curiosity. This is a good pose, for in time it comes true. It eventually withers the little silly tentacles which at first it merely ignores. Curiosity needs food as much as any of us, and dies soon if denied it. And I am glad, for it seems to me that curiosity and spite 25are very closely akin, and that spite is very near to the bottom of the pit.
The memory of Mr. Rust’s remark, however, kept the gardener for some moments busy being incurious. He was not altogether successful in his pose, for when the pallid owner of the Red Place stepped out of a thicket in front of him, he thought with a secret quiver, “Now I shall know what it was....”
“Taking a morning walk—what?” remarked Mr. Rust, achieving his ambition, the commonplace, for once in perfection.
“No,” replied the gardener (one who never told a lie unless he was posing as a liar), “I was leaving you. I have left a smile of thanks and a halfpenny on your plate. You know I’m a rover, an incurable vagabond, and my fraternity never disappears in an ordinary way in the station fly.”
It is rather tiresome to have to explain one’s poses. It is far worse than having to explain one’s witticisms, and that is bad enough.
“Come back to breakfast,” said Samuel. “I can let you into a much more paying concern than vagabondage.”
It is not in the least impressive to disappear by brute force in public, so the gardener turned back.
The gods did not run out to meet the returning vagabond, as they had run out to meet him arriving. The gardener did not look for them. He was too much occupied in thinking of small cramping things 26like “paying concerns.” The expression sounded to him like a foggy square room papered in a drab marbled design.
“A paying concern does not interest me at all,” he said, feeling rather noble.
“It won’t as long as you’re a merry vagabond. But your situation as such is not permanent, I think. Wouldn’t you like to go and strike attitudes upon the sea?”
The gardener was intensely interested in what followed.
Mr. Samuel Rust was penniless, owing, as he frankly admitted, to propensities which he shared with the common sieve. But in other directions he was well supplied with blessings. He had, for instance, a mother. And the mother—well, you know, she managed to scrape along on nine thousand a year—what? The said mother, excellent woman though she was, had refused to finance the Red Place. She had not come within the radius of its blessing. She had no idea that it was under the direct patronage of the gods, and that it promised a fortune in every facet. Samuel had explained these facts to her, but she had somehow gathered the impression that he was not unbiassed. In her hand she held the life of the Red Place, and at present held it checked. A little money for advertisement, a few hundred pounds to set the heart of the place beating, and Samuel Rust saw himself a successful man, standing with his gods on terms of equality. But 27his mother had become inaccessible, she had in fact become so wearied by the conversation of Samuel upon the subject that she had made arrangements to emigrate to Trinity Islands, somewhere on the opposite side of the world.
“And what is it to do with me?” asked the gardener, who suffered from the drawbacks of his paramount virtue, enthusiasm, and never could wait for the end of anything. “Do you want me to turn into an unscrupulous rogue and dog her footsteps because——”
“You can have scruples or not as you choose,” said Mr. Rust. “But rogue is a word that exasperates me. It’s much the same as ‘naughty-naughty,’ and that is worse than wickedness. The wicked live on brimstone, which is at least honest; but the naughty-naughty play with it, which is irreverent. With or without your scruples, armed only with the blessing and the promise of this place, I want you to cross the Atlantic on the Caribbeania with my mother, and tell her what it is the gods and I are waiting for. That is—just try and talk the old lady round—don’t you know. Any old twaddle would do—what?”
The gardener produced two halfpennies, one of which he placed on each knee.
“And the fare first-class is ...” he said.
“I have a cousin whose only virtue is that he occasionally serves the purpose of coin,” said Mr. Rust. “That is—I know a fellow I can bleed to a 28certain extent—what? He is the son of—well, a middling K-nut at the top of the shipping tree—what?”
The gardener had visions of an unscrupulous rogue, neatly packed into a crate labelled champagne, being smuggled on board the Caribbeania. Truly the pose had possibilities. The affair was, however, vague at present, and the gardener retained, whatever the r?le he was playing, an accurate mind and a profound respect for the exactness of words.
“Will he stow me away?” he asked.
“Not in the way you mean. But there’ll be room for you on the Caribbeania. Come down to Southampton with me now. There’s a train at noon.”
“I have my own feet, and a good white road,” replied the gardener in a poetic voice. “I’ll join you in Southampton this evening.”
“It’s thirty-five miles,” said Mr. Rust. “And the boat sails to-morrow morning. However.... We haven’t discussed the business side of the affair yet.”
“And we never will. I’ll take my payment out in miles—an excellent currency.”
In spite of the distance of his destination, the gardener stood by his determination to go by road. A friendly farmer’s cart may always be depended on to assist the pose of a vagabond. It would have been extremely hackneyed to approach the opening door of life by train. So he left his blessing with 29the Red Place, and shook the hand of its white master, and set his face towards the sea.
It was still early. The sun had set the long limbs of the tree-shadows striding about the woods; the gorse, a tamed expression of flame, danced in the yellow heat; the heather pressed like a pigmy army bathed in blood about the serene groups of pines. There was great energy abroad, which kept the air a-tingle. The gardener almost pranced along.
Presently he came to a woman seated by the roadside engrossed in a box of matches.
“You again,” said the gardener to the suffragette, for he recognised her by her hat. There was a bunch of promiscuous flowers attached to her hat. They were of an unsuitable colour, and looked as though they had taken on their present situation as an after-thought, when the hat was already well advanced in years. A mariage de convenance.
“Have you any matches?” was the suffragette’s characteristic reply.
“I never give away my matches to people with political opinions without making the fullest enquiries,” replied the gardener. “People are not careful enough about the future morals of their innocent matches in these days.”
Forgetting the thirty-five miles, he sat down on the bank beside her, and began to refresh Hilda by splashing the water into her pot out of a tiny heathery stream that explored the roadside ditch.
“I can supply you with all particulars at once,” 30said the suffragette in a businesslike voice. “I am going to burn down a little red empty hotel that stands in the woods behind you. There is only one man in charge.”
“You are not,” said the gardener, descending suddenly to unfeigned sincerity.
“Certainly it is not the home of an Anti,” continued the suffragette, ignoring his remark. “At least as far as I know. But you never can tell. A Cabinet Minister might want to come and stay there any time; there are good golf-links. I had hoped that the last affair, the burning of West Grove—a most successful business—would have been my last protest for the present. I meant to be arrested, and spend a month or two at the not less important work of setting the teeth of the Home Office on edge. But the police are disgracefully lax in this part of the world, and though I left several clues and flourished my portmanteau in three neighbouring villages, nothing happened. I do not like to give myself up, it is so inartistic, and people are apt to translate it as a sign of repentance. But the little hotel is a splendid opportunity.”
One of the drawbacks of posing yourself is that you are apt to become a little blind to the poses of others. Also you must remember that women, and especially rebellious women, were an unexplored continent to the gardener.
“You are not going to take advantage of the opportunity,” said the gardener, refreshing Hilda so 31violently that she stood up to her knees in water.
“I’ve heard the caretaker is constantly out ...” went on the suffragette.
“Possibly,” admitted the gardener. “But if the house were twenty times alone, you should not light a match within a mile of it. How dare you—you a great strong woman—to take advantage of the weak gods who can’t defend themselves.”
The great strong woman crinkled her eyes at him. She was absurdly small and thin.
“Well, if you won’t lend me any matches, I shall have to try and do with the three I have. I am going to reconnoitre. Good-morning.”
There is nothing so annoying as to have one’s really impressive remarks absolutely ignored. I myself can bear a great deal of passing over. You may with advantage fail to see my complexion and the cut of my clothes; you may be unaware of the colour of my eyes without offending me; I do not care if you never take the trouble to depress your eyes to my feet to see if I take twos or sevens; you may despise my works of art—which have no value except in the eyes of my relations; you may refuse to read my writings—which have no value in any eyes but my own,—all these things you may do and still retain my respect, but when I speak you must listen to what I say. If you don’t, I hate you.
The gardener felt like this, and the retreating form of the suffragette became hateful to him. Somehow delightfully hateful.
32“Come back,” he shouted, but incredible though it may seem, the woman shrugged one shoulder at him, and walked on towards the Red Place.
It was most undignified, the gardener had to run after her to enforce his will. He arrived by her side breathless, with his face the colour of a slightly an?mic beetroot. It is very wrong of women to place their superiors in such unsuperior positions.
I hope I do not strike you as indulging my suffragettism at the expense of the gardener. I am very fond of him myself, and because that is so, his conceit seems to me to be one of his principal charms. There is something immorally attractive in a baby vice that makes one’s heart smile.
The gardener closed his hand about the suffragette’s thin arm.
“You will force me to take advantage of my privilege,” he said, and looked at his own enormous hand.
The suffragette stood perfectly still, looking in the direction she wanted to go.
“Turn back,” said the gardener. But she made a sudden passionate effort to twist her arm out of his grasp. It was absurd, and very nearly successful, like several things that women do.
The gardener’s heart grew black. There seemed nothing to be done. No end could be imagined to the incident. His blue sea future dissolved. He pictured himself standing thus throughout eternity, with his hand closed around the little splinter of life 33she called her arm. Time seemed to pass so slowly that in a minute he found he knew her looks by heart. And yet he was not weary of them. I suppose the feeling he found in himself was due to a certain reaction from the exalted incident of the blue and golden young lady who had divined the loneliness of the threepenny bit. For he discovered that he did not so very much mind hair that had but little colour in it, and that he found attractive a pointed chin, and an under lip that was the least trifle more out-thrust than its fellow.
“Do you know why I want to stop you?” he said at last.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because you are not a woman, and don’t understand.”
“Because I am a man, and I understand.”
She was silent.
“Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t. I mean that I am a man, and I am not going to let you go, because you must come with me to the uttermost ends of the earth.”
“Why?”
“Because I love the shape of your face, you dear little thing.”
The gods should not be disturbed. Also there was something very potent in the impotent trembling of her arm.
34There was an unnaturally long pause. Then she turned round.
“Let us discuss this matter,” she said, and gave him her portmanteau to carry. The gardener loosed her arm and walked beside her. Silence and a distance of a yard and a half were maintained between them for some way.
The gardener was gazing in blank astonishment at that ass, the gardener of three minutes ago. Into what foolery had he not plunged?
If I could always be the Woman I Am, I should be a most rational and successful creature. It is the Woman I Was who makes a fool of me, and leaves me nervous as to the possible behaviour of the Woman I Shall Be.
There was something in the way the suffragette’s neck slipped loosely into her collar which took a little of the sting out of the gardener’s regrets. But the little plain eyes of her, and the aggressive manners of her, and the misguided morals of her—that was the sequence in which the gardener’s thoughts fell into line.
As for the suffragette, her heart, in defiance of anatomy, had gone to her head, and was thundering rhythmically there. She was despising herself passionately, and congratulating herself passionately. How grand—she thought: how contemptible—she thought. For she was a world’s worker, a wronged unit seeking rights, a co-heritor of the splendour of the earth, a challenger, a warrior. 35And now, quite suddenly, she discovered a fact the existence of which she had seldom, even in weak moments, suspected. She found that—taken off her guard—she was a young woman of six-and-twenty.
“How laughable,” she thought—and did not laugh—“I’m as bad as the ‘Oh my dear’ girls.”
“Now,” she said at last, “what did you mean by that?”
“Only that you look like a good friend,” replied the gardener, who, poor vagabond, was blushing furiously. “Mightn’t we be friends?”
“I am a friend to women,” said the suffragette slowly. “I’m a lover of women. But never of men. I wouldn’t stir an inch out of my way for a man. Unless I wanted to.”
“And do you want to?”
She looked at the gardener’s profile with the eyes of the newly discovered young woman of six-and-twenty. Hitherto she had seen him only with the militant eyes of armed neutrality. She looked at the rather pleasing restlessness of his eyes, and the high tilt of his head. His eyes were not dark with meaning, as the eyes of heroes of novels should be, they were light and quick. The black pupils looked out fierce and sharp, like the pupils of a cat, which flash like black sparks out of the twilight of its soul. The gardener’s eyes actually conveyed little, but they looked like blinds, barely concealing something of great value.
Presently the suffragette said: “Can you imagine 36what you feel like if you had been running in a race, and you had believed you were winning. The rest were miles behind wasting their breath variously; and then suddenly your eyes were opened, and you saw that you had been running outside the ropes of the course, for you were never given the chance to enter for the competition.”
“Good,” said the gardener enthusiastically. “So you’re tired of running to no purpose, and you’re coming back to the starting-place to begin again.”
“No,” said the suffragette, as firmly as though she had the muscular supremacy and could start back that moment to pit her three matches against the gods. “Never. There’s no such thing as running to no purpose. It’s excellent exercise—running, but I’ll never run with the crowd. There are much better things than winning the prize. There’s more of everything out here—more air, more light, more comedy, more tragedy. Also I get there first, you know. When you get the law-abider and the church-goer in a crowd, they increase its moral tone, but they lessen its power of covering the ground.”
“Personally I never was inside,” said the gardener, who had a natural preference for talking about himself. “But then I am building a path of my own.”
“Anyway, what did you mean originally?”
The gardener blushed again. He showered reproaches on himself. “Only that we might walk 37into Southampton as friends. And if we liked it.... Besides I owe you a shilling, and you’d better keep an eye on your financial interests. My boat sails to-morrow. You know, it is a nice shock to me to find that a militant suffragette is human at all. When I held your arm, I was surprised to find it was not iron.”
“Did you say your boat sailed to-morrow?”
“I should have said, ‘Our boat sails to-morrow.’”
“There’s no time to walk. We’ll hire a car in Aldershot.”
So at sunset, side by side, they arrived in sight of Southampton’s useful but hackneyed sheet of water.
Even then they had no plans. In youth one likes the feeling of standing on empty air with a blank in front of one.
The suffragette paid for the car without question. “I am quite well off,” she excused herself, as they traversed the smug and comfortless suburbs of the town. “Has that shilling I lent you to invest brought in any interest?”
“I hate money,” posed the gardener; “but I have a profession, you know. I am a gardener.”
“And where is your garden?”
“I have two. This is one”—and he held up Hilda, who was looking rather round-shouldered owing to the exertions and emotions of the day—“and the world is the other. It also happens that 38I have had three months’ training in a horticultural college.”
The gardener did not talk like this naturally, any more than you or I do. But in addition to his many other poses he posed as being unique. Unfortunately there is nothing entirely unique except insanity. Of course there are better things than insanity. On the other hand, it is rather vulgar to be perfectly sane.
The suffragette went to an hotel, and the gardener went to meet Mr. Samuel Rust at their appointed meeting-place.
Mr. Rust looked even more colourless against the brownness of the town than he had seemed against the redness of his place. He wore town clothes, too, and one noticed them, which is what one does not do with a well-dressed man. The ideal, of course, is to look as if the Almighty made you to fit your clothes. There are a great many unfortunates whose appearance persists in confessing the truth—that the tailor made their clothes to fit them.
Mr. Samuel Rust, however, was not self-conscious. He escaped that pitfall, but left other people to be conscious of his appearance for him.
“Come along,” he said, skipping up to the gardener like a goat, or like a little hill. “I’ve sounded my cousin on the telephone, and the outlook is not otherwise than middling hopeful. He’s promised, in fact, to ship you on board the Caribbeania. 39The question is—what as? What can you do?”
“I am a gardener—in theory.”
“Unfortunately only facts are shipped on Abel’s line.”
“Then all is over. For I am just a sheaf of theories held together by a cage of bones. There is no fact in me at all.”
“Don’t be humble. It’s waste of time in such a humiliating world.”
“I’m not humble”—the gardener indignantly repudiated the suggestion. “I’m proud of being what I am. I am more than worthy of the Caribbeania.”
“Then come and prove it,” said Mr. Rust, and dragged the gardener passionately down the street.
The gardener found himself placed on the door-step of an aspiring corner house. Mr. Samuel Rust stood on a lower step with his back to the door. It is part of the code of shadows to pretend, when you have rung the bell, that you do not care whether the door is opened or not.
The gardener, following the code of the socially simple, stood with his nose nearly touching the knocker, and his eyes glued to the spot where the head of the servant might be expected to appear. It therefore devolved on him to draw Mr. Rust’s attention to the eventual appearance of a black-frocked white-capped answer to his summons.
“Ah!” exclaimed Samuel, “Mr. Abel in?”
40The maid, with fine dramatic feeling, stepped aside, thus opening up a vista, at the end of which could be seen Mr. Abel advancing with both hands outstretched.
When people shake hands with both their hands and both their eyes and all their teeth, and with much writhing of the lips, you at once know something fairly important about them. They have acquired the letter of enthusiasm without its spirit, and their effect on the really enthusiastic is like the effect of artificial light and heat on a flower that needs the sun.
The gardener became as though he were not there. All that he vouchsafed to leave at Mr. Rust’s side in the library of Mr. Abel was a white and sleepy-looking young man, standing on one fourteen-inch foot while the other carefully disarranged the carpet edge. The gardener was not shy, though on such occasions he looked silly. He was really encrusted in himself; loftily superior to Mr. Abel and his like he hung, levitated by the medium of his own conceit, at a level far above Mr. Abel’s house-top.
Fortunately Mr. Abel and Mr. Rust both took his aloofness for the sheepishness to be expected of one of his age.
“This is the instrument of my designs, and the victim of your kindness, Abel,” remarked Mr. Rust. “He doesn’t always look such an ass. He is a gardener, by profession.”
41“In theory,” added the gardener, whose armour of aloofness had chinks. There is something practical about this inconsistent young man which he has never yet succeeded in smothering, and to this day, though he poses as being superbly absent-minded, his mind is generally present—so to speak—behind the door.
“In theory,” repeated Mr. Abel, ecstatically amused. He made it his business to shoot promiscuous appreciation at the conversation of his betters, and though his aim was not good, he was at least gifted with perseverance. If you shoot enough, you must eventually hit something. Hereafter he kept his profile agog towards the gardener, a smile hovering round that side of his mouth in readiness for his guest’s next sally.
One pose in which the gardener has never approached is that of the wag, and he made renewed efforts to unhook his mind from this exasperating interview.
“Is there any opening for a gardener on the Caribbeania?” asked Mr. Rust.
“A gardener ...” said Mr. Abel, looking laboriously reflective. “We have no gardener as yet on board.”
“But is there a garden?” asked Mr. Samuel Rust acutely.
“A garden,” repeated Mr. Abel, ruminating intensely. “There is the winter garden. And a row 42of geraniums on the promenade deck. And some trellis work with ivy. Yes, there is certainly a garden.”
“Then the thing is settled,” said Mr. Rust, and at these hopeful words the gardener rose loudly from his chair.
“Wait a moment,” said Mr. Abel in the same voice as the voice in which Important Note is printed in the Grammar Book. “What about the salary?”
There was no reply and no sensation. The gardener was yearning towards the door.
“Of course....” said Mr. Abel. “The position is not one of any responsibility, and therefore could hardly be expected to be a paying one. Your passage out....”
“I wouldn’t touch money. I hate the feel of it,” said the gardener abruptly. That threw Mr. Abel into a paroxysm of humour.
On the door-step the gardener did a heroic thing. He turned back and found Mr. Abel in the hall, completely recovered from his paroxysm.
“What about——” began the gardener, with the suffragette in his mind. “Dangerous to lose sight of her,” he thought.
“What about what?” asked Mr. Abel, and was again very much amused by the symmetry of the phrase. He was a bright-mannered man.
The gardener’s new pose lay suddenly clear before him.
“What about my wife?” he asked.
43He was rather pleased with the sensation he made.
“Your wife?” exclaimed Mr. Rust and Mr. Abel in duet (falsetto and tenor).
“What on earth did you do with her last night?” continued Samuel solo.
“Can’t she ship as stewardess?” asked the gardener.
Poor suffragette! But in the eyes of men one woman is much the same as another. Every woman, I gather, is a potential stewardess. This is woman’s sphere when it takes to the water. The gardener thought he knew all about women. All her virtues he considered that she shared with man, but her vices he looked upon as peculiarly her own.
“The boat sails to-morrow,” Mr. Abel observed reproachfully. “The stewardesses have been engaged for weeks.”
“Why can’t you leave her behind, what?” asked Mr. Rust. “Women do far too much travelling about nowadays. There’s such a thing as broadening the mind too far, you know. Sometimes, like elastic, it snaps. A lot of women I know have snapped.”
“Yes,” said the gardener. “But it would be better for England if I took her away.”
This spark nearly put an end to the career of Mr. Abel. He squeezed the gardener’s hand in an agony of appreciation.
“I won’t go without her,” said the gardener, rather surprising himself. He gave Mr. Abel no 44answering smile. He was too busy reproaching himself.
“Abel,” implored Mr. Rust. “I simply can’t let old Mrs. Paul go without some one to keep the Red Place in her line of thought. This is obviously the man for the job. My career hangs on you. Be worthy. That is—be a sport, now, what?”
“I’ll find your wife a berth,” said Mr. Abel, accompanying each word with a dramatic tap on the gardener’s arm. “The boat is not full.”
“Settled,” exclaimed Mr. Samuel, and after that, of course, escape followed. The idea of dinner together hovered between the two as they emerged into the principal street, but as both were penniless, the idea, which originated chiefly in instinct, died.
The gardener went to call on the suffragette. He was conscientious in his own way, and fully realised that the woman had a right to know that she was now a wife, and, if not a stewardess, an intending passenger on a boat bound immediately for the uttermost ends of the earth.
He found the suffragette, looking sad, playing a forlorn game of solitaire in forlorn surroundings in the little hotel sitting-room. With her hat off she looked not so ugly, but more insignificant. Her hair seemed as if it would never decide whether to be fair or dark until greyness overtook it and settled the question. It had been tidied under protest, and already strands of it were creeping over her ears, like deserters leaving a fortress by stealth.
45The room was papered and ceiled and upholstered in drab, there were also drab photographs of unlovable bygones on the walls, and some drab artificial flowers in a drab pot on the table.
There are some colour schemes that kill romance. Directly the gardener felt the loveless air of the place, he plunged headlong into the cold interview. Like a bather who, on feeling the chill of the sea, hastens desperately to throw it around him from head to foot.
“I have been telling lies,” said the gardener.
“I have been crying,” said the suffragette.
They each thought that it was thoughtless of the other to be so egotistical at this juncture. There is nothing that kills an effect so infallibly as a collision in conversation.
“I have been telling lies,” said the gardener, “about you.”
“I have been crying—about you.”
(These women....)
The gardener took a deep breath, recoiled for a start, and ran upon his subject.
“I have told them that you are my wife, and that you are coming with me on the Caribbeania, sailing to-morrow morning for Trinity Islands.”
“Told who ... Caribbeania ... Trinity Islands ...” gathered the suffragette, with a woman’s instinct for tripping over the least essential point. And then she interviewed herself laboriously on the subject.
46There was ample motive for a militant protest, and that was a comfortable thought. She was justified in throwing any article of the drab furniture at the gardener’s sharp and doubtful face. This creature had put himself in authority over her without the authority to do so; he had decided to lead her to Trinity Islands, whereas her life’s work lay in England. This cold and curious boy had twisted off its hinges the destiny of an independent woman. She had hitherto closed the door of her heart against to-morrow. She had momentarily liked the idea of having a friend who loved the shape of her face, especially as he was leaving the country to-morrow. The unconventionality of the friendship had crowned as an ornament a life of dreadful refinement. She had meant to step for a moment from the lonely path, and now she found that her way back was barred—by this impenetrable trifle. It was infuriating. But the suffragette searched in vain for a trace of real fury in her heart. She tested the power of words.
“It is infuriating,” she said.
“Yes,” said the gardener, not apologetically. “I quite see that.”
But she did not see it herself—except in theory.
“All the same,” said the gardener, “you are an incendiary, not exactly a woman. Can’t two friends, an incendiary and a horticultural expert, go on a voyage of exploration together? Mutual exploration?”
“One can be alone in couples,” thought the suffragette. 47“It would be studying loneliness from a new angle. My life has been a lifeless thing, run on the world’s principles; I shall try a new line, and run it on my own principles.”
But, as I may have mentioned, she was a woman, so she said: “What is to prevent my going back to that house in the woods now, and burning it down—if I ever meant to do it?”
“Me,” said the gardener.
“But you can’t sit there with your eyes pinned to me until the boat sails.”
“Unless you give me your word as a World’s Worker that you will not leave the hotel, I shall stay here, and so will you.”
For quite a long time the suffragette’s upbringing wrestled with all comers, but it was a hopeless fight from the first. There is no strength in the principles created out of a lifeless past. Besides, the woman of six-and-twenty was very much flattered and fluttered, whatever the militant suffragette might be.
“I will come with you on your exploration tour,” she said, and her voice sounded like the voice of the conqueror rather than the conquered. “I will give my word as a—woman without principles that I will not leave Southampton except to go on board the Caribbeania.”
The gardener left her, he felt innocently drunk. He made his way out of the amethyst light of electricity, into the golden light of the outskirts of the 48town, and thence into the silver light of the uncivilised moon. On the beach the tide was receding, despite the groping, grasping hands of the sea, which contested every inch of the withdrawal. The gardener stumbled upon the soft solidity of the sand above high-water mark, and slept the sleep of the thoroughly confused. He dreamt of a pearl-and-pink sea, and of unknown islands.
I need hardly say, after all this preamble, that the suffragette and the gardener sailed next day on the Caribbeania for Trinity Islands.
Mr. Samuel Rust, for some time before the boat started, was conspicuous for a marked non-appearance on the wharf’s edge.
The gardener, who had a vague feeling that tears should be shed in England on his departure, stood feeling a little cold at heart on the starboard side of the main deck, looking at the tears that were being shed for other people.
The suffragette, who was under the impression that her hand was against all men, stood bleakly on the port side, looking at the hydro-aeroplanes leaping self-consciously about the Solent in seven-league boots. She was proud to stand thus aloof and unhampered on the threshold of a novelty. The pride she had in her independence was one of her compensations. This is a world of compensations, and that is what makes it the hollow world it is sometimes. So seldom do we get the real thing that in this age we congratulate ourselves upon our compensations.
49Mr. Samuel Rust made a late and dramatic appearance upon the gangway after the first bell of preparation for departure had been rung. His hat, inspired by the prevalent aviation craze, blew away. But Mr. Rust’s thoughts were occupied with other things than the infidelity of hats. He passed the gardener without noticing him, and with restrained fervour addressed a square elderly woman, who stood leisurely on the deck, surrounded by an officious maid, like a liner being attended to by a tug.
Mr. Samuel Rust did not seem like the sort of person who would have had a mother. He gave the impression of having been created exactly as he stood, with one stroke of the Almighty Finger, and not gradually evolved like you or me. You could imagine the gardener, for instance, at every stage of his existence. You could picture those light bright eyes under those scowling brows looking out of lace and baby-ribbons in a proud nurse’s arms. You could see him as the fierce little schoolboy, with alternately too much to say and too little. You could imagine him as an old man, with that thick hair turned into a white strong flame upon his head, and those already deep-set eyes blazing out of hewn hollows above his abrupt cheek-bones. But Mr. Samuel Rust seemed to have no past and no future.
He addressed the woman who, contrary to appearances, had played an important part in the creating of him.
50“I couldn’t let you go without saying good-bye to you, Mrs. Paul,” he said.
“Of course you couldn’t,” said Mrs. Rust, and the words seemed shot by iron lips from above a chin like a ship’s ram.
Something that might have usurped the name of a kiss passed between them, and Mr. Samuel hurried to the impatient gangway. As he passed the gardener he winked earnestly, conscious of his mother’s eyes on the back of his head. The gardener, feeling delightfully unscrupulous and roguish, made no sign.
The vulgarly tuneful swan-songs of Cockney emotion trailed from the deck to the wharf and back again. The sound was like thin beaten silver, becoming thinner as the distance increased. There were tears among the women on land, and the shivering water blurred the reflections of the crowd until they looked as though they were seen through tears. The last song fainted in the air, the crowd on the wharf ceased to be human, and became a long suggestion of many colours, a-quiver with waving handkerchiefs.
The gardener looked at Mrs. Paul Rust. There was a tear following one of the furious furrows that bracketed her hyphen of a mouth.
The south of England is a land that reluctantly lets her deserters go. For full twelve hours she stands on tiptoe on the sea-line, beckoning their return.
51The gardener watched the land and felt the sea for long hours. He felt no regret at having forsaken one for the other. For the moment he prided himself on heartlessness, or rather on intactness of heart, for he had left none of it behind. He was proud of the fact that he loved no one in the world. He prided himself on his vices more than on his virtues. There seems something more unique in vice than in virtue.
The gardener had the convenient sort of memory that is fitted with water-tight doors. His mind conducted a process by which the past was not kept fresh and green, nor altogether left behind, but crystallised and packed away on shelves in a businesslike manner. He could label it and shut it away without emotion. He shut away England now, and rejoiced to do so. Poor grey silly England that I am so glad to leave and so glad to see again....
The gardener turned presently to look for his garden, and found—the girl Courtesy.
Her brilliant and magnetic hair.
Her broad face with the abrupt flush on the cheeks, that was an inartistic accompaniment to the red of her hair, and looked as if Nature had become colourblind at the moment of giving Courtesy her complexion.
She herself looked herself—simple yet sophisticated.
“To think of seeing you here,” she said. “Who would have thought it.”
52The gardener was one of those who are never surprised without being thunderstruck. He was very thorough in habit, and drank every emotion to its dregs.
His manners fell in ruins about him. His hat remained upon his head. His words remained somewhere beneath his tongue.
“I got a sudden invitation from a cousin in Trinity Island,” explained Courtesy. “And Dad gave me my passage out as a birthday present. I gave the threepenny bit to a porter, so I hope you don’t want it back. Have you kept a halo for me in this Paradise?”
“There is the glassy sea,” replied the gardener, recovering. “And the halo is just flowering. It is exactly the colour of your hair.”
“I hope the sea will be as you say,” said Courtesy, “for I’m a shockin’ bad sailor.”
And at that moment the sea ceased to be totally glassy. You could suddenly feel the slow passionate heart of the sea beating.
Courtesy did not look at the change in this poetic light at all. She hurried along the deck and disappeared.
Even if you are a good sailor there is, apart from a natural pride in your sailorship, little joy about a first day on board. The climate of the English seas is not adapted to ocean travel. If I could steam straight out of Southampton Harbour into the strong yet restrained heat that I love, if I could glide from 53the wharf—mottled with regrets—straight to the silver and emerald coasts of a certain land I know, where the cocoanut palms lean out over the strip of immaculate sand, to see their reflections in the opal mirror of the sea, I think I should love the first day as much as I love its successors. And yet I would not have the voyage shortened by a minute.
I wonder why nobody has ever brought forward as a conclusive Anti-suffrage argument the fact that more women are sea-sick than men on the first day of a sea-voyage. I can so well imagine the superb line the logic of such a contention would take. If the basis of life is physical ability, and if physical ability depends upon the digestion, then must the strong digestion only constitute a right to citizenship. To the wall with the weak digestion.
Mrs. Paul Rust and the suffragette were the only women who scaled the heights of the dining saloon for that evening’s meal. Mrs. Rust looked supremely proud of her immunity from sea-sickness; all the men looked laboriously unaware that such a thing as sea-sickness existed; the suffragette looked frankly miserable. The gardener was obliged to remind himself casually from time to time that there was no pose that included sea-sickness.
But any disastrous tendency he might have had to give too much thought to his inner man was checked by the appearance of Mrs. Paul Rust, the fortress he was there to besiege. She was a truly remarkable woman to look at. The absence of her hat revealed 54a surprise. Her hair was dyed a forcible crimson. And it might have been mud-coloured like mine for all the self-consciousness she showed. It was so profoundly remarkable that for a time one’s attention was chained to the hair, and one forgot to study the impressive general effect, of which the hair was only the culminating point. Mrs. Rust’s only real feature was her chin, but no one ever realised this. Her eyes and nose were too small for her face, and seemed to fit loosely into that great oval; her mouth was only redeemed by the chin that shot from beneath it. Altogether she would have been sufficiently insignificant-looking had it not been for her hair. She proved the truism that the world takes people at their own valuation.
It is always a surprise to me when a truism is proved true. I have come across the rock embedded in these truisms several times lately to my cost. And each time it bruises my knuckles and shocks me. It almost makes one wonder whether, after all, the ancients occasionally had their flashes of enlightenment.
The world thought of Mrs. Paul Rust what she thought of herself. It is so often too busy to work out its own conclusions.
Of a modest woman with a heavy jaw, the world would have said, “A dear good creature, but dreadfully underhung.” Of a well-chinned woman with dyed hair, it said, “There goes a strong character.” The hair did it, and the hair was dyed by human 55agency. Providence had no hand in the making of Mrs. Rust’s forcible reputation. Nowadays we leave it to our dressmaker, and our manicurist, and our milliner, and our doctor, and our vicar, to make us what we are. This is an age of luxury, and it is so fatiguing to assert a home-made personality. Shall I go to my hairdresser and say, “Here, take me, dye me heliotrope. Make an influential woman of me”?
The gardener did not quail before the terrifying outer wall of Mrs. Rust’s fortress. Believing as he did that man makes himself, and that the pose of victor is as easy to assume as any other, he was unaware of the reality of the word ‘defeat.’ Whether woman also makes herself, I never fully understood from the gardener at this stage. But I gathered that woman takes the r?les that man rejects.
The gardener, as a protégé of Mr. Abel, who, on the Caribbeania, was respected because he was not personally known, found himself treated à la junior officer, streaked with a certain flavour of second-class passenger, but distinctly suggesting ship’s orchestra. He was allowed to have his meals in the first-class saloon, he was occasionally asked about the weather by lady passengers, and the captain and officers looked upon him good-naturedly, as a sort of example of poetic licence.
It seemed a good thing when dinner was over. One had proved one’s courage, and the strain was past. The suffragette, who had given a proof rather 56of obstinacy than of courage, retired weakly to her cabin. And the gardener stood on deck and looked at the sea, while the moon followed the ship’s course with her eyes. A table companion, an Anglican priest, with a weak chin and piercing eyes, came and leaned upon the rail at the gardener’s side.
“You smoke?” he asked, and you could hear that he was very conventional, and that he believed that he was not.
A man-to-man sort of man.
“No,” said the gardener, and added, “I have no vices.”
He said this sort of thing simply to exasperate. The pose of indifference to the world’s opinion is apt, sooner or later, to lead to the pose of wilful pricking of the world’s good taste. The gardener had a morbid craving for unpopularity; it was part of the unique pose. Unpopularity is an excellent salve to the conscience; it is delicious to be misunderstood.
The priest did not appear exasperated. He was tolerant. The man who aims at unlimited tolerance, as a rule, only achieves the absorbent and rather undecided status of spiritual blotting-paper. But he is a dreadfully difficult man to anger.
I hate talking to people who are occupied in reminding their conscience: “After all this is my sister, albeit, a poor relation. I must be tolerant.” Then they pray for strength, and turn to me, spiritually renewed, with a brave patient smile.
This was the priest’s pose.
57“You have no vices?” he said, in a slow earnest voice. “How I envy you!”
The gardener was more concerned with the varied conversation of the sea. Each wave of it flung back some magic unspeakable word over its shoulder as it ran by. But he answered the priest:
“You don’t really envy me, you would rather be yourself with virtues than me without vices.”
The priest smiled the inscrutable smile of the vague-minded. “You have a very original way of talking. You interest me. Yerce, yerce. Tell me what you were thinking about when I came up.”
The gardener did so at once. Sometimes his imagination weighed heavily upon his mind, and he expanded, regardless of his listeners.
“I was thinking about the things I saw,” he said. “Things that I often see before I have time to think. Snapshots of things that even I have never actually imagined. Do you know, wonders crash across my eyes like a blow, when I am thinking of something else. Ghosts out of my enormous past, I suppose. There was a very white beach that I saw just now, with opal-coloured waves running along it, and a mist whitening the sky. There were very broad red men in grey wolf-skins, standing in the water, dragging dead bodies from the sea. There were little children, blue and thin, lying dead upon the beach. I know the way children’s ribs stand out when they are dead. I have never seen a dead child, except those....”
58“You ought to write fiction, yerce, yerce,” said the priest. “You have a very strong imagination.”
“I have,” admitted the gardener. “But not strong enough to control these visions that besiege me.”
The priest, who had preached more and known less about visions than any one else I can think of, was constrained to silence.
Next morning the gardener found his garden. He saw it under varied aspects and at varied angles, for a gold and silver alternation of sun and shower chequered the Atlantic, and inspired the Caribbeania to a slow but undignified dance, like the activities of a merry cow. The high waves came laughing down from the high horizon, and curtseyed mockingly at her feet.
There was a bay tree in a tub on either side of the entrance to the garden, and the gardener, as he stood between them, surveying his territory, slid involuntarily from one to the other and back again, as the world wallowed. The garden was conventionally conceived, by a carpenter rather than a gardener. Grass-green trellis-work, which should belong essentially to the background, here usurped undue prominence. Arches in the trellis-work, looking to the sea, gave bizarre views, now of the heavy hurried sky, now of the panting sea. Hanging drunkenly from the apex of each arch was a chained wicker basket, from which sea-sick canariensis waved weak protesting hands. A few creepers, lacking sufficient 59initiative for the task set before them, clawed incompetently at the lowest rungs of the trellis. A row of geraniums in pots shouted in loud brick-red at the farther and more sheltered end of the garden. It was impossible to tolerate the thought of Hilda associating with those geraniums. She was a very vulnerable and emotional soul, was Hilda. Deep orange is a colour beyond the comprehension of the vermilion and vulgar. A few sodden-looking deck-chairs occupied the gardener’s territory, and repelled advances. But on the farthest sat the suffragette. She was crying.
If you have ever crossed the Bay of Biscay while weakened by emotion, you will not ask why she was crying.
The gardener dropped his pose between the bay trees, and did something extraordinarily pretty, considering the man he was. He sat on the next deck-chair to hers, and patted her knee.
“My fault ...” he said. “My fault....”
Of course he did not really believe that it was his fault, but it was unusually gracious of him to tell the lie.
The suffragette turned her face from him. She had cried away all her vanity. Her hair was lamentable, her small plain eyes were smaller than ever, and her nose was the only pink thing in her face.
“I’m very morbid,” she said. “And that at any rate is not your fault.”
“Don’t let’s think either about you or me,” said 60the gardener, and it would have been wise had he meant it. “We have all our lives to do that in, and it is a pity to do it in the Bay. When one’s feeling weak, it’s easier to fight the world than to fight oneself.”
The suffragette was a grey thing, a snake-soul. To the eye of a grey soul there is something forbidding about the many colours of the universe, and you will always know snake-people by their defensive attitude. It is an immensely lonely thing to be a snake, to have that tortuous spirit, with no limbs for contact with the earth. And yet the compensation is most generous, for there are few joys like the joy of knowing yourself alone.
In cubes of blue, in curves of mauve,
They spotted up my firmament;
And with my sharp grey heart I strove
To stab the colours as they went.
“Lou-la ...” they said—“Lou-la, a thing
At war without a following.”
“Lou-la ...” they cried—and now cry I—
“At war without an enemy....”
“I can’t think how you dare to speak out your imagination,” said the suffragette. “Most people hide it like a sin.”
He was always willing to be the text of his own oratory.
“Imagination is my Genesis, and my Book of Revelations,” he answered. “There is nothing with more power. It is stronger than faith, for it can 61really move mountains. It has moved mountains, it has moved England from my path and left me this clear sea.”
The suffragette walled herself more securely in. “I have no imagination at all,” she lied, and then she added some truth: “I am very unhappy and lonely.”
“The other day ...” said the gardener, “you were happy to be independent and alone.”
“That’s why I’m now unhappy to be independent and alone. You can’t discover the heaven in a thing without also tripping over the hell. I like a black and white life.”
“Don’t think,” said the gardener suddenly, and almost turned the patting of her knee into a slap. “It’s a thing that should only be done in moderation. Some day you won’t be able to control your craving for thought, and then you’ll die of Delirium Tremens.”
“It’s not such a dangerous drug as some,” smiled the suffragette. “I’d rather have that craving than the drink craving, or the society craving, or the love craving.”
“Better to have nothing you can’t control.”
“You hypocrite! You can’t control your imagination.”
“You’re right,” said the gardener after a pause. He was a curiously honest opponent in argument. Besides, she had stopped crying, and there was no special reason for continuing the discussion. Also 62Mrs. Paul Rust at that moment appeared between the bay trees.
Mrs. Rust’s hair looked vicious in a garden, beside the geraniums, which were at least sincere in colour, however blatant.
“Is this private?” she asked. There was something in the shy look of the garden, and in the reproachful look of the gardener, that made the question natural.
“No,” said the gardener. “This is the ship’s garden.”
“Good,” said Mrs. Paul Rust.
She always said “good” to everything she had not heard before. To her the newest was of necessity the best. Originality was her ideal, and as unattainable as most ideals are. For she was not in the least original herself. She was doomed for ever to stand outside the door of her temple. And “good” was her tribute of recognition to those who had free passes into the temple. It owned that they had shown her something that she would never have thought of for herself. For nothing had ever sprung uniquely from her. Even in her son she could only claim half the copyright.
The suffragette tried to rearrange her looks, which certainly needed it. There are two sorts of women, the women before whom you feel you must be tidy and the women before whom such things don’t matter. Mrs. Rust all her life had belonged to the former, 63all her life what charm she had, had lain in the terror she inspired.
For the first time the gardener questioned himself as to his plan of attack. Hitherto he had pinned his faith to inspiration. He had left the matter in the hands of his private god, Chance. His methods were very simple, as well as bizarre. His mind was a tortuous path, but he followed it straightforwardly, and never looked back. To do him justice, however, I must say that he searched his repertoire for a suitable point of conversational contact with Mrs. Rust. Finding none, he dispensed with that luxury.
“I am the ship’s gardener,” he said, smiling at his intended victim.
Mrs. Rust was broad, and the deck-chair was narrow. It was some time before a compromise between these two facts could be arrived at, so the remark came upon her at a moment of some stress.
“Now, then, what was that you were saying?” she asked at last, in an unpromising voice.
The gardener, who was very literal in very small things, repeated his information, word for word, and inflection for inflection. “I am the ship’s gardener.”
Mrs. Rust grunted. She showed no tolerance for the thing that was not sensational. Nor had she any discrimination in her search for the novelty. Still, energy is something.
“But I am only ship’s gardener in theory,” persisted 64the gardener. “In practice I don’t even know where the watering-can is kept.”
“Then you are here under false pretences,” retorted Mrs. Rust a little more genially, for his last remark was not everybody’s remark.
“I am,” said the gardener, suddenly catching a fleeting perspective of the path to her good graces.
“Good,” said Mrs. Rust, and turned her little bright eyes upon him.
When she opened her eyes very wide, it meant that she was on the track of what she sought. When she shut them, as she often did, it meant that she did not understand what was said. But it gave the fortunate impression that she understood only too well. She was instinctively ingenious at hiding her own limitations.
It was the end of that interview, but a good beginning to the campaign.
The sea to some extent recovered its temper within that day. Towards the evening, when slate and silver clouds, with their backs to the Caribbeania, were racing to be the first over the horizon, the garden was invaded by passengers, racing to be the first over the boundary of sea-sickness. The silence of the unintroduced at first lay, like a pall, along the deck-chairs, but a mutual friend was quickly found in Mothersill, whose excellent invention was represented in every work-bag. The bright noise of women discussing suffering rippled along the garden. Abuse of the Caribbeania’s stewardesses 65sprang from lip to lip. It was a pretty scene, and the gardener turned his back on it, and went below to water Hilda.
The gardener’s cabin, which was impertinently shared by a couple of inferior souls, was as square as a box, and furnished with nautical economy. The outlook from its porthole was as varied in character as it was limited in size. At one moment one felt oneself the drunken brain behind the round eye of a giant, staring into green and white obscurity; at another one blinked, as a mist of spray like shivered opal spun up over one’s universe; again one enjoyed an instantaneous glimpse of the flat chequered floor of the Atlantic; and at rare intervals the curtain of the sky slid over the porthole, and the setting sun dropped across the eye like a rocket.
Hilda sat wistfully on the recess of the porthole, leaning her forehead against the glass. She had a bud, chosen to match Courtesy’s hair. Just as Hilda’s stalk was necessary to hold her bud upright, so Courtesy herself was necessary to support the conflagration of her hair on the level of the onlooker’s eye. Both were necessities, and both were artistically negligible.
The gardener looked around the cabin. There is something depressing about other people’s clothes. There is something depressing in an incessant attack on one’s skull by inanimate objects. There is something depressing in a feeling of incurable drunkenness unrelieved by the guilty gaiety that usually accompanies 66such a condition. There is something depressing about ocean life below decks at any time. The gardener and Hilda sat in despair upon the hardhearted thing that sea-going optimists accept as a bed.
“Of course I don’t want to go home,” the gardener told himself.
Hilda, poor golden thing of the soil, had no doubts as to what she was suffering from. But the gardener wondered why despair had seized him. Until he remembered that the spirit of the sea walks on deck alone, and is never permitted by the stewards to enter the cabins. He climbed the companion-way, like a tired angel returning to heaven after a stuffy day on earth. He came upon Courtesy making a bad shot at the door that leads to the Promenade deck.
“Come and sit in the garden,” he said in a refreshed voice.
On deck, a few enterprising spirits were playing deck quoits against the elements. The general geniality whose rule only lasts for the first three days of a voyage was reigning supreme. Young men were making advances to young ladies with whom they would certainly quarrel in forty-eight hours’ time, and young ladies were mocking behind their hands at the young men they would be engaged to before land was reached. The priest, with an appearance of sugared condescension, was showering missiles upon the Bullboard as though they were blessings. (And they were misdirected.) The inevitable 67gentleman who has crossed the Atlantic thirty times and can play all known games with fatiguing perfection, was straining like a greyhound on the leash towards the quoits which mere amateurs were usurping. Captain Walters, who has a twin brother on every liner that ever sailed, was brightly collecting signatures for a petition to the Captain concerning a dance that very evening.
The gardener, with unusual cordiality, gave the reeling Courtesy his arm, as they threaded the maze of amusements towards the garden.
There was only one deck-chair unoccupied. It was labelled loudly as belonging to some one else, but Courtesy, always bold, even when physically weakest, advanced straight upon it. It was next to the suffragette’s. And the gardener became for the first time aware of a cat in a bag, and of the fact that the cat was about to emerge.
The suffragette was the sort of person next to whom empty chairs are always to be found. She had plenty to say, and what she said was often rather amusing, but it was always a little too much to the point, and the point was a little too sharp. She had a certain amount of small talk, but no tiny talk. She was not so much ignored as avoided. She had altogether missed youth, and its glorious power of being amused by what is not, correctly speaking, amusing. Her generation thought her “brainy,” it was very polite to her. Do you know the terrible sensation of being invariably the last to be chosen at Nuts in 68May? This was the suffragette’s atmosphere. My poor suffragette! It is so much more difficult to bear the snub than the insult. Insult is like a bludgeon thrown at the inflated balloon of our conceit. With the very blunt force of it we rebound. But the snub is a pin-prick, which lets our supporting pride out, and leaves us numb and nothing. I always feel the insult is founded on passion, while the snub springs from innate dislike.
“May I introduce Miss Courtesy Briggs ...” began the gardener, hoping for an inspiration before the end of the sentence. “Miss Courtesy Briggs....”
Both women looked expectant.
“Miss Courtesy Briggs ... my wife.”
“O Lor’!” said Courtesy, and then, with her healthy regard for conventions, remembered that this was not the proper retort to an introduction.
“When you left Penny Street, a week ago ...” she said to the gardener, as she shook the suffragette’s hand, “you didn’t tell me you were engaged.”
“I wasn’t,” said the gardener.
Courtesy dropped the subject, because it was hardly possible to continue it. She was not the girl to do what was conventionally impossible. Besides the bugle was sounding to show that dinner was within hailing distance. Courtesy was a slave of time. Her day was punctuated by the strokes of clocks. Her life was a thing of pigeon-holes, and if some of the pigeon-holes were empty they were all 69neatly labelled. She was the sort of person who systematically allowed ten minutes every morning for her prayers, and during that time, with the best intentions, mused upon her knees about the little things of yesterday. It is a bold woman that would squeeze Heaven into a pigeon-hole.
Theresa stopped in front of the gardener’s chair. Theresa’s surname had been blown away from her with the first Atlantic wind. So had the shining system in her yellow hair. So had most of her land conventions. She was not a thing of the ocean, but a thing of the ocean liner. She had immediately become Everybody’s Theresa. I could not say that everybody loved Theresa, but I know that everybody felt they ought to.
“Captain said no dance this evening,” said Theresa, in her telegraphic style. “Too much sea on. Doctor said broken legs. But I went and wheedled. Called the Captain Sweet William. Dance at nine.”
The dance was at nine. There were no limits to what Theresa could do—in her sphere.
A proud quartermaster was superintending the last touches of chalk upon the deck, when the gardener and the suffragette led the exodus from the dining-saloon.
In Paradise I hope I shall be allowed a furious walk around a windy rocking deck at frequent intervals throughout eternity. I know of nothing more poetic, and yet more brilliantly prosaic. At such 70moments you can feel the muscles of life trembling by reason of sheer strength.
The suffragette and the gardener walked so fast that the smoke from the suffragette’s cigarette lay out along the wind like the smoke behind a railway train. The strong swing of the sea threw their feet along. There was a moon in the sky and phosphorus in the sea.
But there are people who go down to the sea in ships, and yet confine their world to the promenade-deck. The heart of Theresa’s world, for instance, was the shining parallelogram, silvered with chalk, on the sheltered side of the deck. Theresa, looking extremely pretty, was superintending the over-filling of her already full programme.
“Mustn’t walk round like that,” she said in the polite tones that The Generation always used to the suffragette. “Must find partners, because the orchestra will soon begin to orch.”
“We are not dancing,” said the gardener. One always took for granted that the suffragette was not dancing.
“If you will dance,” said Theresa, “I will give you number eight.” She assumed with such confidence that this was an inducement, that somehow it became one.
“Thank you very much,” replied the gardener. “I’ll ask Courtesy Briggs for one, too.”
The suffragette sat down upon an isolated chair.
“May I have a dance?” asked the gardener of 71Courtesy. “I can’t dart or stagger, only revolve.”
“I was sea-sick only three hours ago,” retorted Courtesy with simplicity. “But I have a lot to talk to you about, so you can have number one. And we’ll begin it now.”
But the orchestra was still idling in the melancholy manner peculiar to orchestras. Why—by the way—is there something so unutterably sad in the expression of an orchestra about to play a jovial onestep?
“I do want to know about your marriage,” pursued Courtesy, whose curiosity was a daylight trait, like the rest of her characteristics. “When did it happen, and where did you meet her, and why did you have a wedding without me to help?”
“I met her—on the way to Paradise,” said the gardener, posing luxuriously as an enigma. “We got married on the way too. It was a no-flowers-by-request sort of wedding, otherwise we would have invited you.”
“But I can’t understand it,” said Courtesy. “Only a week ago you were snivelling over a broken boot-lace.”
The gardener’s pose had a fall. He might have expected that Courtesy would trip it up.
The violins, relieving their feelings by a preliminary concerted yell, settled down to a lamentation in ragtime.
The gardener danced rather well, as his mother had taught him to dance. Courtesy danced rather 72well, after the manner of The Generation. But the Caribbeania danced better than either. She reduced them to planting their four feet wide and sliding up and down. The ship’s officers, with their lucky partners, leaning to the undulations of the deck, like willows bending to the wind, showed to immense advantage. They evidently knew every wave of the Atlantic by heart. But among the remaining dancers there was much unrest. Captain Walters, who was accustomed to be one of the principal ornaments of a more stationary ballroom, at once knocked his partner down and sat upon her. Theresa and a subaltern slid helplessly at the mercy of the elements into a forest of chaperons. The gardener and Courtesy leaned together and clung, with a tense look on their faces.
I dare not say what angle the deck had reached when the orchestra, with an unpremeditated lapse into a Futurist style of melody, broke loose, and glided in a heaving phalanx to join the turmoil. The piano, being lashed to its post, remained a triumphant survivor, calmly surveying the fallen estate of the less stable instruments.
“I am not enjoying myself a bit,” said Courtesy, as she disentangled a violin from her hair, and strove to dislodge the ’celloist from his position on her lap. The gardener disliked agreeing with any one, but he seemed by no means anxious to continue dancing. The orchestra also seemed a little loth to 73risk its dignity again at once, and even Theresa, though still plastered with a pink smile, was retiring on the arm of her subaltern to a twilit deck-chair.
In the distance, among her rows of empty chairs, the suffragette was smiling. She had watched the dancing with that half-ashamed sort of amusement which some of us feel when we see others making fools of themselves. And because she smiled, the priest came and sat beside her. He considered himself a temporary shepherd in charge of this maritime flock, and you could see in his eye the craving for souls to save. He had hardly noticed the suffragette until her smile caught his eye, but directly he did notice her he saw that she was not among the saved. He therefore approached her with the smile he reserved for the wicked.
“Very amusing, is it not?” he said.
Now the suffragette liked to see the young busy with their youth, but because she was a snake she could not bear to say so. Especially in answer to “Very amusing, is it not?”
So she said, “Is it?” and immediately cursed herself for the inhuman remark. Some people’s humanity takes this tardy form of hidden self-reproach after expression, and then it strikes inward, like measles.
“Well, that’s as it may be, yerce, yerce,” said the priest, who was so tolerant that he had no opinions of his own, and had hardly ever been guilty of contradiction. 74“That is your husband, is it not?” he added, as the gardener extricated himself from the knot of fallen dancers.
The suffragette actually hesitated, and then she said, “Yes,” and narrowly escaped adding, “More or less.”
“A most interesting young man,” said the priest, who, with the keen eye of the saver of souls, had noticed the hesitation.
“Naturally he interests me,” said the suffragette.
“He is so original,” continued the priest. “Even his occupation strikes one as original. A gardener on an ocean liner. The march of science, yerce, yerce. Most quaint. I suppose you also are interested in Nature. I always think the care of flowers is an eminently suitable occupation for ladies.”
“Perhaps,” she admitted. “But I am not a lady. I am a militant suffragette.”
The priest’s smile changed from the saintly to the roguish. “Have you any bombs or hatchets concealed about you?” he asked.
“I wish I had,” she replied. I fully admit that her manners were not her strong point. But the priest persisted. He noted the absence of any answering roguishness, and recorded the fact that she had no sense of humour. True to his plastic nature, however, he said, “Of course I am only too well aware of the justice of many of women’s demands, yerce, yerce. But you, my dear young lady, you are as yet on the threshold of life; it is written plain upon 75your face that you have not yet come into contact with the realities of life.”
“In that case it’s a misprint,” said the suffragette. “I am twenty-six.”
“Twenty-six,” repeated the priest. “I wonder why you are bitter—at twenty-six?”
“Because I have taken some trouble not to be sweet,” she said. “Because I was not born blind.”
As a matter of fact she had been born morally short-sighted. She had never seen the distant delight of the world at all.
The priest did not believe in anything approaching metaphor. He considered himself to be too manly. So he deflected the course of the conversation. “And your husband. What are his views on the Great Question?” (A slight relapse into roguishness on the last two words.)
“I have never asked him. I know he does not believe in concrete arguments from women. Though he approves of them from men.” She fingered a bruise on her arm.
“The arguments about women’s lack of physical force are the most incontrovertible ones your cause has to contend with,” said the priest. “Say what you will, physical force is the basis of life.”
“I think it is a confession of weakness.”
“There is something in what you say,” said the priest. He did not really think there was, for he had taken no steps to investigate. He was busy thinking that this was an odd wife who did not know 76her husband’s views on a question that obsessed her own thoughts.
The gardener had by now extracted Courtesy from the tangle, and was steering her towards a chair.
“Your husband appears to know that young lady with the auburn hair,” said the priest. “He knew her before he came on board, did he not?”
“Apparently he did,” said the suffragette. “I didn’t.”
She was providing him with so many clues that he was fairly skimming along on the track of his prey. When he left her he felt like a collector who has found a promising specimen.
“Altogether on the wrong lines,” he told himself, and added, “Poor lost lamb, how much she needs a helping hand”; not because he felt sorry for her, but because word-pity was the chief part of his stock-in-trade.
Next morning the Caribbeania had flung the winds and waves behind her, and had settled down to a passionless career along a silver sea under a silver sky,—like man, slipping out of the turmoil of youth into the excellent anti-climax of middle life.
Similes apart, however, the Caribbeania was now so steady that an infant could have danced a jig upon her deck. Several infants tried. Amusements rushed upon her passengers from every side. A week passed like a wink. Hardly were you awake in the morning before you found yourself pursuing 77an egg round your own ankles with a teaspoon. Sports and rumours of sports followed you even unto your nightly bunk. Everybody developed talents hitherto successfully concealed in napkins. Courtesy found her life’s vocation in dropping potatoes into buckets. She brought this homely pursuit to a very subtle art, and felt that she had not lived in vain. Not that she ever suffered from morbid illusions as to her value. The gardener brought to light a latent gift for sitting astride upon a spar while other men tried with bolsters to remove him. The suffragette, when nobody was looking, acquired proficiency in the art of shuffling the board. When observed, she instinctively donned an appearance of contempt. Mrs. Paul Rust settled herself immovably in a chair and applauded solo at the moments when others were not applauding. The priest, looking in an opposite direction, clapped when he heard other hands being clapped, in order to show the kind interest he took in mundane affairs.
While occupied thus, one day, he found himself next to Courtesy. That determined lady had her back to a Whisky and Soda Race then in progress, and looked aggrieved. She had been beaten in the first heat, whereas she was convinced that victory had been her due. Courtesy suffered from all the faults that you and I—poetic souls—cannot love. She was greedy. She was fat. She could not even lose a race without suspecting the timekeeper of corruption. All the same, there was something so entirely 78healthy and human about her, that nobody had ever pointed out to her her lack of poetry, and of the more subtle virtues.
The priest, who had also never been able to lose a game without losing his temper too, sympathised with Courtesy, and employed laborious tact in trying to lead her thoughts elsewhere.
“Trinity Islands are your destination, are they not, yerce, yerce?” he said.
“Yes,” replied Courtesy. “And I wish this old tub would buck up and get there.”
“You have reasons of your own for being very anxious to arrive?” suggested the priest archly.
“Nothing special that I know of,” answered Courtesy. “I’m only an ordinary globe-trotter.”
Frankly, she was being sent out to get married. But this, of course, was among the things that are not said. Her father had become tired of supporting a daughter as determined to study art in London as she was incapable of succeeding at it. He had accepted for her a casual invitation from a cousin for a season in the Trinity Islands. The invitation was so very casual that Courtesy had appreciated the whole scheme as a matrimonial straw clutched at by an over-daughtered parent. But her feelings were not hurt. She had bluff, tough feelings.
“How curious that you should have found former friends on board!” said the priest. “How small the world is, is it not?”
“Yes, isn’t it?” assented Courtesy, whose heart 79always warmed towards familiar phrases. “And so odd, too, him being married within the week like this.”
The priest pricked up his ears so sharply that you could almost hear them click. “So quickly as that?” he encouraged her.
“Yes, when he left the private hotel where he and I were both staying just over a fortnight ago, he was not even engaged. He says such quaint things about it, too. He says he picked her up on the way to Paradise.”
The mention of Paradise confirmed the priest’s worst suspicions. But “Yerce, yerce....” was his only reply to Courtesy.
Late that night the priest walked round and round the deck trying to peer into the face of his god, professional duty. His conscience was as short-sighted as some people’s eyes, and he was often known to pursue a shadow under the impression that he was pursuing his duty.
“Of course I must warn the Captain,” he said. “And that bright young lady who unconsciously gave me the news. And Mrs. Rust, who encourages that misguided young man to talk. And Mrs. Cyrus Berry, who lets her children play with him. As for the woman—I always think that women are the most to blame in such cases.”
Although he was altogether narrow his limits were indefinite, except under great provocation. He had not strength enough to draw the line anywhere. 80“Wicked” was too big a word for him; and although he believed that the gardener and the suffragette were in immediate danger of hell-fire, he could only call them “misguided.” This applies to him only in his capacity as a priest. In his own interests he was very much more sensitive than he was in the interest of his God.
Sometimes I think that angels, grown old, turn into enemies to trap the unwary. The angel of tolerance was the great saviour of history, but now he saps the strength of every cause. Either I Am Right, or I May Possibly Be Right. If I may only possibly be right, why should I dream of burning at the stake for such a very illusory proposition? But if I am right, then my enemy is Wrong, and is in danger of hell-fire. That is my theory. My practice is to believe that belief is everything, and that I may worship a Jove or a stone with advantage to my soul. Belief is everything, and I believe. But if my enemy believes in nothing, then I will condemn him. Why should I be tolerant of what I am convinced is wrong?
The priest, in the dark, found some one clinging round his knees. A woman—a little woman—wrapped so tightly in a cloak that she looked like a mummy. Her face was grey, and her lips looked dark. Her hair lay dank and low upon her brow, and yet seemed as if it should have been wildly on end about her head. The whole of her looked horribly restrained—bound with chains—and her 81eyes, which should have given the key to the entreaty which she embodied, were tightly shut. For five seconds the priest tried to run away. But she held him round the knees and cried, “Save me, save me!”
Nobody had ever come to the priest with such a preposterous request before.
“Let me go, my good woman,” he said, audibly keeping his head. “Be calm, let me beg you to be calm.”
She let him go. But she was not calm.
It was very late, and the deck-chairs had been folded up and stacked. As the woman would not rise to the priest’s level, he saw nothing for it but to sink to hers. They sat upon the deck side by side. He felt that it was not dignified, but there was nobody looking. And otherwise, he began to feel in his element. Here was a soul literally shrieking to be saved.
“What is it? Tell me. You have sinned?” he asked.
“Certainly not,” replied the woman in a hard thin voice. “I have never deserved what I’ve got. It seems to me that it’s God who has sinned.”
“Hush, be calm,” the priest jerked out. “Be calm and tell me what has upset you so much.”
The woman began to laugh. Her laughter was absurdly impossible, like frozen fire. It lasted for some time, and the world seemed to wait on tiptoe for it to stop. It was too much for the priest’s nerves, and for his own sake he gripped her arm to 82make her stop. She was silent at once. The grip had been what she needed.
“Now tell me,” said the priest.
She paused a little while, and seemed trying to swallow her hysteria. When she spoke it was in a sane, though trembling voice. “I am not Church of England, sir, but you being a man of God, so to speak, I thought ... I am suffering—terribly. There’s something gnawing at my breast ... I’ve prayed to God, sir; I’ve prayed until I’ve fainted with the pain of kneeling upright. But he never took no notice. I think he’s mistaken me for a damned soul ... before my time. Why, I could see God smiling, I could, and the pain grew worse. I’ve been a good woman in my time; I’ve done my duty. But God smiled to see me hurt. So I prayed to the Devil—I’d never have believed it three months ago. I prayed for hell-fire rather than this. The pain grew worse....”
“Have you seen the doctor?”
“Oh, yes. And he said the sea-voyage would do me good. He couldn’t do nothing.”
“Poor soul!” said the priest, and found to his surprise that he was inadequate to the occasion. “Poor soul, what can I say? It is, alas, woman’s part to suffer in this world. Your reward is in heaven. You must pin your faith still to the efficacy of prayer. You cannot have prayed in the right spirit.”
“But what a God—what a God ...” shouted 83the woman with a wild cry. “To hide himself in a maze—and me too distracted to find out the way. Why, my tears ought to reach him, let alone my prayers. I’ve sacrificed so much for him—and he gives me over to this....”
“This is terrible, yerce terrible,” said the priest. “My poor creature, this is not the right spirit in which to meet adversity. Put yourself in God’s hands, like a little child....”
The woman dragged herself suddenly a yard or two from him. “Oh, you talker—you talker ...” she cried, and writhed upon the deck.
“Listen,” said the priest in a commanding voice. “Kneel with me now, and pray to God. When we have prayed, I will take you to the doctor, and he will give you something to make you sleep.”
“I won’t touch drugs,” said the woman. “And I don’t hold with that young doctor in brass buttons. If I pray now with you, will you promise that I shall be better in the morning?”
“Yes,” said the priest. It was spoken, not out of his faith, but because that seemed the only way to put an end to the scene. And when he prayed, in a musical clerical voice, he prayed not out of his heart, but out of his sense of what was fitting.
The stars bent their wise eyes upon the wise sea and bore witness that the priest’s prayer never reached heaven’s gate.
“Now you feel better, do you not?” he asked, when he had said all that had occurred to him, and 84intoned a loud Amen, as if to give the prayer an upward impetus.
“No,” sobbed the woman.
“Who are you? What is your name?”
“I am Elizabeth Hammer, Mrs. Rust’s maid,” she replied, and staggered in a lost way into the darkness of the companion-way.
“To-morrow it will be better,” the priest called after her. And wished that he could think so.
The world smiled next morning, when the sports began again. Elizabeth Hammer was invisible, probably concealed in some lowly place suitable to her position. The sea was silver, the sky blazed blue, the sun smiled from its height, like a father beaming upon his irresponsible family. Mrs. Paul Rust looked incredible in a pale dress, designed for peculiarity rather than grace; pink roses sprigged it so sparsely as to give the impression of birth-mark afflictions rather than decorations. I am not sure whether the feather in her hat was more like an explosion or a palm tree. The gardener rolled upon a deck-chair with three children using him as a switch-back railway. Theresa was smiling from her top curl down to her toes. Even the suffragette was talking about the transmigration of souls to the fourth officer. Everything on the surface was highly satisfactory, and, on board ship, nothing except the surface matters a bit.
The priest had a leaky mind. He never poured out all that was in it, but he could not help letting a 85certain proportion of its contents escape. He paused in his daily walk of thirty times round the deck, and found a seat beside Mrs. Paul Rust.
“Your maid seems to be in a shocking state of health,” he said.
“She suffers from indigestion,” replied Mrs. Rust. “Some fool of a doctor has told her that she has cancer. She has quite lost her head over it.”
“At any rate she appears to be in great pain,” said the priest, who considered that indigestion was rather too unclothed a word for ordinary use. “And pain is a terrible thing, is it not?”
“No,” said Mrs. Rust.
“You mean that you consider it salubrious for the soul?”
“No,” said Mrs. Rust.
“Then I wonder in what way you consider pain desirable?”
Mrs. Rust, who had meant nothing beyond contradiction, shut her eyes and looked immovably subtle. The priest changed the subject. He had a real gift for changing the subject.
“Have you made the acquaintance of that dark young man who acts as the ship’s gardener?” he asked.
“An excellent young man,” said Mrs. Rust, immediately divining that the priest did not approve of him.
“Yerce, yerce, no doubt an excellent young man,” agreed the priest mechanically. “But I have reason 86to believe that his morals are not satisfactory.”
“Good,” said Mrs. Rust.
“I do not think he is really married to that aggressive young woman he calls his wife.”
“Good,” said Mrs. Rust. She did not approve of such irregularities any more than the priest did, but she disapproved of disapprobation.
The priest, being constitutionally incapable of argument, and yet unable to broaden his view, was left wordless. But an interruption mercifully rescued him from the necessity of attempting a reply.
Elizabeth Hammer, Mrs. Rust’s maid, appeared at the companion door. Her eyes were fixed hungrily upon the sea.
There was a race about to be run, and the starter stood ready to say the word. But Elizabeth Hammer brushed past him and walked across the empty strip of deck. She climbed the rail as though she were walking upstairs, and dropped into the sea.
“Hammer,” barked Mrs. Rust hoarsely, as she heard the splash. That word broke the spell. A woman shrieked, and Captain Walters shouted, “Man Overboard.”
The suffragette was not a heroine. What she did was undignified and unconscious. The heroine should remove her coat, hand her watch to a friend, send her love to a few relations, and bound gracefully into the water. The suffragette, fully clothed, tumbled upside down after Elizabeth Hammer. No 87noble impulse prompted her to do it. She did not know of her intention until she found herself in the water, and then she thought, “What a fool!” She could not swim. The Caribbeania looked as distant as heaven, and as high. She felt as if she had been dead a long time since she saw it last. She paddled with her feet and hands like a dog, her mouth was full of water and of hair. She had never felt so abased in her life, she seemed crushed like a wafer into the sinking surface of the nether pit. For centuries she wrestled with the sea, sometimes for years and years on end a wave tore at her breath. She never thought of Elizabeth Hammer.
“This is absurd,” she thought, when eternity came to an end, and she had time for consecutive thought. She felt sure her eyes were straining out of their sockets, and tried to remember whether she had ever heard of any one going blind through drowning. Then she cried, and remembered that her head must be above water, if she could cry. She knew then that there was some one on her side in the battle. The sea seemed to hold her loosely now, instead of clutching her throat. She had a moment to consider the matter from the Caribbeania’s point of view, and to realise what a pathetic accident had occurred. It dawned upon her that her own hand, wearing her mother’s wedding ring, was just in front of her, holding the cord of a neat white life-buoy. “Caribbeania” painted in black on the life-buoy seemed like a wide mad smile.
88“This is absurd,” bubbled the suffragette. “I shall wake up in a minute now. It’s the air makes one sleepy.” And then she thought of something else for ages and ages, and could not find out what she was thinking of, though she tried all the time.
On the promenade deck of the Caribbeania the gardener stood dumb with enormous astonishment. His soul was dumb, his limbs were numb, his mental circulation was stopped. He had a sort of impression that the Atlantic had been suddenly sprinkled with a shower of women, but he could only think of one drop in the shower.
“How red her face was as she went under—and what a dear she is!”
The Caribbeania had flung the two women behind her, and swept upon her way, only for a second had the red face of the suffragette floated like a cherry upon the water beside the black wall of the ship. The fourth officer had flung a life-buoy. Theresa had fainted. There was a black cork-like thing a thousand miles away which the fourth officer said was the head of one of the women. The Caribbeania, checked in her scornful attempt to proceed uncaring, was being brought round in a circle. A boat was being lowered.
There was a long silence on the promenade deck.
Presently—“Is it—her?” asked Courtesy in a husky voice by the gardener’s side.
“Of course,” answered the gardener.
89Elizabeth Hammer had found the sleep she sought without recourse to drugs.
Everybody watched the distant boat receive the thin small warrior out of the grasp of the sea, and then sweep in wide circles on its search for Elizabeth Hammer.
The dream ended. The boat drew alongside. The suffragette, who had to some extent collected herself, made a characteristic attempt to step unassisted from the boat. It failed. Everybody had come down to the main deck to gratify their curiosity. The suffragette was carried on deck, though she obviously supposed she was walking. She looked somehow out of proportion to the elements with which she had battled.
“You poor lamb,” said Courtesy, looking very dry and motherly beside her. “How do you feel? I’m coming to help you into bed.”
“I am perfectly well, thank you,” said the suffragette.
“Why did you jump overboard if you couldn’t swim?” asked the fourth officer, who was young and believed that there are always reasons for everything.
“It was a mistake,” said the suffragette testily, and was led below by Courtesy and a stewardess.
Tongues were loosened. Everybody reascended to the upper deck to vent their sympathy on Mrs. Paul Rust.
She had remained in her chair, because she felt 90that any other woman would have retired below after witnessing the suicide of an indispensable part of her travelling equipment. But she could not control her complexion. Her face was blue-white like chalk, beneath her incongruous hair. She would reply to no questions, and the priest, after making several attempts to create for himself a speaking part in the drama, was obliged to abandon his intention as far as she was concerned, for lack of support. He turned to the gardener, whose stunned mind was now regaining consciousness.
“I do indeed congratulate you on the rescue of your—your wife,” said the priest. “Yerce, yerce. As for that other poor soul, I was afraid she might make some attempt of the sort. She was suffering from some internal complaint, and had lost control of herself. Of course she had confided in me—yerce, yerce. I was so fortunate as to be able to say a few words of comfort. Perhaps it was a merciful release. But I hope she was prepared at the last. I hope that in that awful moment she thought upon her sins.”
“I hope so too,” said the gardener. “It is good to die with a happy memory in the heart.”
The general impression was that Elizabeth Hammer had made a mistake, poor thing. She was the subject of much conversation but little conjecture. The big problem of her little mind was not so much buried as never unearthed. She had made a mistake, poor thing. That was her epitaph.
91The suffragette was of course a heroine. She was a heroine for the same reason as Elizabeth Hammer was a poor thing—because nobody had analysed her motives. It would have been heresy to suggest that the heroine’s motive had been pure hysteria. She had done a very useless thing in a very clumsy way, but because it had been dangerous she was promoted to the rank of heroine.
“I have been a damn fool,” mourned the suffragette, writhing profanely on her bunk.
“Nonsense,” said Courtesy briskly. “You have been frightfully brave. It was only hard luck that you couldn’t save the woman.”
“But I didn’t try. I had forgotten all about her until this moment.”
“Nonsense,” repeated Courtesy, busy with a hot-water bottle. “You were splendid. We didn’t know you had it in you.”
The suffragette laughed her secret laugh, which she kept hidden beneath her militant exterior. The sort of laughter that flies, not unsuitably, in the very face of tragedy.
“This is a change,” she said.
“What is?”
“To be respected.”
“My dear gal, we all respected you all along. Personally I always told them: ‘Mark my words,’ I said, ‘that gal’s got brains.’”
“Yes, I expect they needed to be told.”
“Nonsense,” said Courtesy.
92“For the last five years,” said the suffragette, “I have followed my conscience over rough land. I have been suffragetting industriously all that time. And every one laughed behind their hands at me. Not that I care. But to-day I have been a fool, and they have promoted me to the rank of heroine.”
“Nonsense,” said Courtesy. “You’re not a fool. And surely you never were a suffragette.”
“I am a militant suffragette,” said the suffragette proudly. “It takes a little courage and no hysteria to march through the city with drunk medical students waiting to knock you down at the next corner; and it takes hysteria and no courage to fall by mistake into the Atlantic.”
“You quaint dear,” said Courtesy, who had not been giving undivided attention to her patient’s remarks. “I do believe you’ve got something in you besides brains after all. There now, you must try and sleep. Pleasant dreams. And if you’re a good gal and wake up with some roses in your cheeks, you shall have your husband to come and have tea with you.”
“No,” said the suffragette. “Don’t call him that.”
Courtesy wrenched the stopper of the hot-water bottle tightly on, as though she were also corking up her curiosity.
As she went upstairs Courtesy discovered that she quite liked the suffragette—from a height. For a person suffering from brains, and from a mystery, 93and from political fervour, and from lack of physical stamina, the woman was quite surprisingly likeable.
On deck, Courtesy’s friendly feeling was immediately put to the test. Mrs. Paul Rust beckoned her to her side.
“That woman who jumped into the water after Hammer ... she is quite well again, of course?” It was rather difficult for Mrs. Rust to put this question, because the most obvious form was, “How is she?” and that would have been far too human.
“She’ll be all right,” said Courtesy. “And even if she wasn’t she wouldn’t say so. She keeps herself to herself. You’ve torn a button off your coat. Shall I sew it on for you? You’ll miss your maid.”
“I shall not,” said Mrs. Rust. “She was a fool to behave in that way. Nothing but indigestion.”
“You shouldn’t speak hardly of the dead,” said Courtesy, indomitably conventional.
“Stuff and nonsense,” retorted Mrs. Rust, and closed her eyes in order to close the subject. “That young woman...”
“I shall call her the suffragette,” said Courtesy. “She says she is one, and she looks like one.”
“At any rate, the priest tells me she is not married to the ship’s gardener. Is that so?”
“It’s not the priest’s business. Nor mine either.”
“You would drop her like a red-hot coal if she were not married.”
“Time enough to decide that later. I don’t approve 94of irregularity, of course. Marriage after all is an excellent idea.”
That turned the balance successfully in the suffragette’s favour. “You are wrong,” said Mrs. Rust. “Marriage is an idiotic institution. It must have been invented by a man, I feel sure. It is like using ropes where only a silken thread is necessary.”
“O Lor’,” said Courtesy.
Mrs. Paul Rust decided to reach the truth by interrogating the gardener. She always tried to approach a mystery by the high-road, rightly considering that the high-road is the most untrodden way in these tortuous days.
“Come here,” she called to the gardener, when Courtesy disappeared to see if her patient was asleep.
“Is that young woman who foolishly jumped into the sea—your wife?” she asked.
The gardener had resisted hours of siege on the subject. He was tired. Besides he instinctively understood Mrs. Rust.
“In some ways she is,” he replied, after rather a blank pause.
“Good,” said Mrs. Rust.
“Is that young man who owns a little red hotel in the woods in Hampshire your son?” asked the gardener, suddenly face to face with an opportunity.
“In some ways he is,” replied Mrs. Rust inevitably, without a smile.
The gardener became more and more inspired. 95“Because if you are his mother, I am his friend, and you may be interested to know that I put your point of view clearly before him when I met him last. He told me that you were unwilling to treat his hotel as an investment, and I said, ‘Why should she?’ I said, ‘You may take it from me that she won’t.’”
“Then you had no business to take my intentions for granted,” retorted Mrs. Rust. “What the dickens did you mean by it?”
“I told him ...” continued the gardener, almost suffocating in the grasp of his own cleverness, “that obviously you could take no notice of so vague a scheme. Ninety-nine women out of a hundred, I said, would do as you were doing.”
“You had better have minded your own business,” interrupted Mrs. Rust wrathfully. “And you had better mind it now. I shall do exactly what I like with my money, no matter what the other ninety-nine women would do.”
“I was afraid you would be annoyed by my speaking like this,” said the gardener humbly. “It is only natural.”
“Stuff and nonsense. Do you know that the priest is shocked by his suspicions about you and your suffragette?”
“I don’t mind,” said the gardener. “Being a priest, I suppose he is paid to be shocked sometimes. I don’t object to being his butt.”
“Good,” said Mrs. Rust. “Then you don’t continue to assert that she is your wife.”
96“I can’t be bothered to continue to assert it,” said the gardener.
“Good,” said Mrs. Rust.
The gardener felt that the reward of the successfully unscrupulous rogue was within his reach. Lying in a good cause is a lovely exercise. The warm feeling of duty begun surged over him. He had justified his presence on board the Caribbeania, he had been true to Samuel Rust. The suffragette was not drowned. The blue sea was all round him. There was little else to be desired.
“I shan’t be an unscrupulous rogue a moment longer than I can help,” thought the gardener. “I shall pose as being good next. We will be married on landing.”
Courtesy at that moment returned and said, “Your wife would like you to come and have tea with her.”
“Don’t leave us alone,” begged the gardener of Courtesy as they went below. “I don’t know how to behave to heroines.”
He was obviously at a loss when he reached the suffragette’s cabin. He had never seen her with her hair down, and that upset him from the start. He shook her gently but repeatedly by the hand, and smiled his well-meaning young smile. He did not know what to say, and this was usually a branch of knowledge at which he was proficient.
“Did you know that Captain Walters won the 97sweep yesterday on the Captain’s number?” he asked.
“Don’t be a donkey,” said Courtesy. There was a genial lack of sting about Courtesy’s discourtesies, which kept her charm intact through all vicissitudes. “She doesn’t want to hear about the sweep. Let her be just now. She’s busy pouring out your tea.”
For in the same spirit as the nurse allows a convalescent child to pour out tea from its own teapot, Courtesy had encouraged the suffragette to officiate. The headquarters of the meal, on a tray, were balanced upon the invalid’s bunk. It was not a treat to the suffragette, who loathed all the details of Woman’s Sphere, but for once she did not proclaim the ungracious truth.
“I’m sorry,” she said nervously. “It’s years since I did anything of this sort. But I don’t know whether you take milk and sugar.”
The gardener distrustfully eyed the hot water with vague aspirations towards tea-dom that dripped into his cup.
“I don’t take either milk or sugar, thank you,” he said, “I like my troubles singly.”
“Naughty boy,” said Courtesy, helping herself generously to cake. “You are beastly rude. And you’re a naughty gal, too, you suffragette. You ought to know how your husband likes his tea.”
“But he’s not my husband,” said the suffragette.
The gardener sat with a bun arrested half-way to 98his mouth. He had lived a self-contained existence, and had never before had a pose of his dismantled by an alien hand. The experience was most novel. He liked the suffragette more and more because she was unexpected.
“Nonsense,” said Courtesy. “You’re feverish. You’ll tell me what you’ll be sorry for, in a minute.”
“It’s true; and I’m far from sorry for it,” said the suffragette. “It’s almost too good to be true, but it is. I’m still alone. But because he thought I was a menace to England’s safety, he brought me away—by force.”
“Perfectly true,” corroborated the gardener.
“You babies,” said Courtesy. “It’s lucky for you it’s only me to hear you.”
“It’s not a secret,” said the gardener. “I’ve just been talking about it to Mrs. Rust.”
“And what did she say?” asked Courtesy and the suffragette together.
“She said, ‘Good.’”
At that moment the voice of Mrs. Rust was heard in the passage outside. “Miss Briggs.”
Courtesy ran clumsily from the cabin.
“That button,” said Mrs. Rust. “You said you would.... Myself I never can remember which finger I ought to wear my thimble on, or at what angle the needle should be held....”
Anybody else, arrived within three feet of the suffragette’s door, would have thrown a smile round the corner. But Mrs. Rust did not. She did possess 99a heart, I am told, but a heart is such a hackneyed thing that she concealed it.
“What do you intend to do when you get to Trinity Islands?” asked the suffragette.
“I don’t know what we shall do,” replied the gardener. “I hate knowing about the future. I am leaving it—not to fate, but to my future self.”
“Don’t you believe in fate?”
“No. I believe in myself. I believe I can do exactly what I like.”
“And what about me? Can’t I do exactly what I like? Do you think you can do exactly what you like with me?” asked the suffragette militantly.
“So far I seem to have succeeded even in that.”
She laughed.
After a pause he said suddenly, “I am a brute to you, you dear, unaccommodating little thing. Somehow my will and my deed have got disconnected in my dealings with you. It is curious that having such good intentions I should still remain the villain of the piece. Yet I meant—if ever I had a woman—to make up to her for all I have seen my mother go through.”
“When you have a woman—perhaps you will ...” said the suffragette. “You must wait and see.”
“Come up and see land,” shouted Courtesy, running in with a semi-buttoned coat in her hand.
The gardener shot up the companion-way, and, 100behold, the gods had touched the sea, and fairyland had uprisen.
A long vivid island, afire in the ardent sun. Its mountain was golden and eccentric in outline, its little town and fortresses had obviously been built by a neat-fingered baby-god out of its box of bricks. The tiny houses had green shutters and red roofs. There was no doubt that the whole thing had only been created a minute or two before, it was so neat and so unsullied. It was nonsense to call the place by the name of a common liqueur, as the quartermaster did, any one could see it was too sudden and too faery to have a name or to make a liqueur. There was something very exciting in the way it had leapt out of a perfectly empty sea, and in the way it sped over the horizon, as if shrinking from the gaze of the proud Caribbeania.
It passed. The gardener had looked at a dream. Courtesy had looked at good dry land. Captain Walters had looked at the monastery from which the liqueur emanated. Mrs. Rust had not looked at all. It is surprising that there should be so much difference in the material collected by such identical instruments as one pair of human eyes and another.
Islands are gregarious animals, they decorate the ocean in conveys. The Caribbeania, her appetite for speed checked, began to stalk them with bated breath.
“We’ll be going through the Hair’s Breadth to-morrow at seven,” said the Captain, in a fat, selfcongratulatory 101voice, as though he had himself created the channel he referred to. “You must all get up early to see her do it.”
There are few penances easier than early rising on board ship. There are no inducements to stay upon the implacable plane that is your bunk, in the hot square cube that is your cabin. Your ear is tickled by the sound of the activities of food in the saloon outside; you can hear the sea singing in a cheerful, beckoning way past your inadequate porthole. You emerge from your cabin and find men in pyjamas, and ladies in flowered dressing-gowns and (if possible) thick pig-tails, or (if impossible) pleasing head-erections of lace, sitting in rows at sparkling tables, and being fed by stewards with apples and sandwiches. There is scarcely ever any need to remind the voyager by sea about the tiresome superiority that distinguishes the ant.
The Captain, therefore, had a large audience ready for his sleight-of-nerve feat of threading the Hair’s Breadth. He looked very self-conscious on the bridge.
Land climbed slowly down the spangled sloped sea from the horizon. There seemed to be no gap in the quivering line of it. Presently, however, as if it had quivered itself to pieces, the line was shattered. Silver channels appeared beckoning on every side. The Caribbeania, blind except to her duty, headed towards the least likely-looking channel of all. The most ignorant passenger on the ship could 102have told the Captain that he was running into certain destruction. Many longed to take command, and to point out to the Captain his mistake. Like a camel advancing foolhardily upon the needle’s eye the Caribbeania approached. Her speed was slackened, she went on tiptoe, so to speak, as if not to awaken the gods of ill-chance, but there was nothing faltering about her. She thrust her shoulders into the opening.
(It would be waste of time to inform me that in nautical language a ship has no shoulders.)
You could have whispered a confidence to the palm trees on either side—except that you would have been afraid to draw enough breath to do so, for fear of deflecting the ship an inch from her course.
Courtesy was, as usual, bold. She spoke in quite an ordinary voice. “Why, look, there’s a man with hardly anything on, paddling! How killing! He’s the colour of brown paper!”
“You’ll soon be dead in Trinity Islands if you find that killing,” snapped Mrs. Rust. “The Captain evidently doesn’t know his business. We’re at least six feet nearer to this shore than the other.”
The first of Trinity Islands heaved before them quite abruptly when they had traversed the channel. The land seemed to have been petrified in the act of leaping up to meet them. I think the wind had changed upon it at a moment of grotesque contortion. My nurse used always to warn me that this 103climatic change might fatally occur when my anatomical experiments became more than usually daring.
Green woods had veiled the harsh shapes of the hills. Palms waved their spread hands upon the sky-line. A tangle of green things tumbled to the water’s edge. Far away to the right a faint blessing of pearl-coloured smoke and a few diamonds flung among the velvet slopes of the hills hinted at the watching windows of Port of the West. Shipping clustered confidentially together on either side of the Caribbeania, like gossips commenting jealously on the arrival of a princess of their kind. The entering liner shook out little waves like messages to alight on the calm shore.
The whole scene looked too heavy to be painted on the delicate sea. It was absurd to think that that pale opal floor should be trodden by the rusty tramp-steamers, the tall red-and-black sailing ships, the panting tugs, the blunt and bloated coal-tenders laden with compressed niggerhood. There were broadheaded catfish, and groping jellyfish in the water, and they alone looked fashioned from and throughout eternity for the tender element that framed them.
The suffragette, who had risen from her berth, contrary to the advice of Courtesy and of the doctor, looked at the first of Trinity Islands with her soul in her eyes and a compressed adoration in her breast. For there was a silver sea, silver mist enclosing the 104island, and a silver shore shining through the mist. Silver, of course, is idealised grey—grey with the memory of black and white refined away. Silver is the halo of a snake-soul.
The day was mapped out in so many ways by the different passengers of the Caribbeania, that, from their prophetic descriptions, you could hardly recognise it as the same slice out of eternity. There were globe-trotters, eager to trot this tiny section of the globe in hired motor-cars, others anxious to buy souvenirs in Port of the West all day, others nervously determined to call upon the Governor in search of a Vice-regal luncheon, others without imagination desirous of fishing for catfish from the poop, and a very few who dared to avow their intention of spending the day in absorbing cold drinks on the verandah of the King’s Garden Hotel.
In theory the gardener wished to lie upon a chair on the shady side of the deck, with a handkerchief over his face all day. Such a course would have been flattering to his dignity and to his worship of aloofness. In practice his unquenchable energy and that of the suffragette were too much for him. He was vividly stirred by the strange land. The clawlike hands of the palms beckoned him.
Following the suffragette, he bounded on to the first launch as eagerly as though he were not a man of theory. Behind him bounded Courtesy, and behind her Mrs. Paul Rust strove to bound. Courtesy, the gardener, and the suffragette sat squeezed in a 105row upon a dirty seat in the launch. Mrs. Rust, because sitting in a squeezed row was against her principles, stood. By these means she kept many men-passengers standing in wistful politeness during the whole journey of three miles to the shore.
The bay swept its wide arms farther and farther round them. The palm trees on the promontories on either side of the town looked no longer beckoning, but grasping.
“Oh, isn’t it good!” said the gardener, thrilling so that Courtesy and the suffragette, by reason of compressed propinquity, had to thrill too. He took the suffragette’s hand violently, and waggled it to and fro. “Isn’t it fine ...” and he jumped his feet upon the deck.
“You babies,” said Courtesy. For the suffragette, even though she did not jump her feet, was jumping her eyes, and obviously jumping the heart in her breast. Most unorthodox for a snake.
“We shall run head foremost into the wharf,” said Mrs. Rust in a final voice. “What a pity it is that sailors never know their work.”
“Yes, isn’t it,” agreed the gardener, as if he had been longing to say something of the sort. “Extraordinary. Fine. Won’t it be fine if we run head foremost into the wharf, and sink, to be sealed up in this blue jewel here!”
He tried to pat the bay with his hand.
“Closed in the heart of it,” said the suffragette, “like flies in amber.”
106“I shouldn’t like it at all,” sniffed Courtesy.
“Not like flies in amber,” said the gardener. “Because flies spoil the amber.”
“Well, you and I wouldn’t exactly decorate the sea,” remarked the suffragette.
“Look at those cannibals waiting for us,” said Courtesy. “My dears, I’m simply terrified.”
The cannibals received them from the launch with the proverbial eagerness of cannibals. In the first three minutes of their arrival on land the travellers could have bought enough goods to furnish several bazaars had they been so inclined. The suffragette, by tickling the chin of a superb blue and yellow bird, was considered to have tacitly concluded a bargain with the owner as to the possession of it, and there was much discussion before she was disembarrassed of her unwelcome protégé. The gardener bought two walking-sticks in the excitement of the moment, before he remembered that he was devoid of money. The owner of the walking-sticks, however, kindly reminded him of the one-sidedness of the purchase, and he was obliged to borrow from the suffragette.
The town, like a brazen beauty feigning modesty, was withdrawn a little from the wharves. There was a dry-looking grass space with goats as its only gardeners. This the party crossed, and the sensitive plant ducked and dived into its inner remoteness as they passed. The streets in front of them, hot and glaring, pointed to the hills, like fevered fingers pointing to peace which is unattainable.
107The main street received them fiercely. The heat was like the blaring of trumpets. The trams were intolerably noisy, clanking, and rattling like a devil’s cavalry charge. Black, shining women, with the faces of bull-dogs—only not so sincere—swung in a slow whirlwind of many petticoats up and down the street, with vivid burdens of fruit piled in ochre-coloured baskets on their heads. Little boys and girls, with their clothes precariously slung on thin brown shoulders, and well aired by an impromptu system of ventilation, ran by the gardener’s side, and reminded him of the necessity of quatties and half-pinnies, even in this paradise of the poor, where sustenance literally falls on your head from every tree in the forest.
“This is exhausting,” said Mrs. Paul Rust, forced by extreme heat into a confession of the obvious. “Policeman, where can we get a cab?”
“Yes, please, missis,” replied the policeman, who was tastefully dressed in white, by way of a contrast to his complexion.
“Nonsense, man,” said Mrs. Rust. “I repeat, where can a cab be found?”
“No, please, missis,” replied the policeman, acutely divining that his first answer had been found wanting.
“You fool,” said Mrs. Rust, another unoriginal comment wrung from her by the heat.
The policeman understood this, and giggled bashfully in a high falsetto.
108“Missis wanta buggy?” asked a tobacconist, with a slightly less dense complexion, from his shop door. “Policeman nevah understand missis, he only a niggah.”
The gardener, as ever prone to paint the lily, hurried into the breach. “Ah yes, of course, we white men, we always hang together, eh?”
It was The Moment of that tobacconist’s life. The gardener all unawares had crossed in one lucky stride those bitter channels that divide the brown man from the black, the yellow man from the brown, the white man from the yellow, and the buckra, the man from England, from all the world.
Three buggies suddenly materialised noisily out of Mrs. Rust’s desire. They were all first upon the scene, as far as one could judge from the turmoil of conversation that immediately arose on the subject. The gardener tried to look firm but unbiassed. The three women stood and waited in a state of trance.
The sun was working so hard at his daily task in the sky, that one could almost have pitied him for being called to such a flaming vocation in this flaming weather.
Finally, Mrs. Rust awoke and, entering the nearest buggy, shook it to its very core as she seated herself and said, “King’s Garden Hotel.”
She could hardly have been recognised as the Mrs. Rust of the Caribbeania. You could see her pride oozing out in large drops upon her brow. Her hat was on one side, and completely hid her sensational 109hair, but for one flat wisp, like an interrogation mark inverted, which reached damply to her eyebrow.
The buggy horse, which consisted of a few promiscuous bones, badly sewn up in a second-hand skin, was more than willing to pause until the rest of the party should be seated, and even then seemed desirous of waiting on the chance of picking up yet another fare. It was, however, reminded of its duty by its driver, and turned its drooping nose in the direction of the King’s Garden Hotel.
When they reached that heavenly verandah, they felt for a moment as though they were suffering from delusions. The Caribbeania seemed to have arrived on shore bodily. A long vista of familiar profiles rocked cheek by jowl, nose beyond nose, from end to end of the verandah. There was Theresa, who had made no secret of her intention of accompanying Captain Walters “for a lark” on a visit to a Trinity Island Picture Palace. There was the priest, who had expressed a determination (which nobody had tried to alter) to explore the famous botanical gardens all by himself all day. There was the fourth officer, who had left the Caribbeania inspired by a vision of a long walk to a sandy beach with a bathe at the end of it. There was the captain, who had set out to buy his wife a stuffed alligator as a silver-wedding present.
That cool strip of green rocking-chairs had acted on them all like a spider’s web, with the manager of 110the King’s Garden sitting in the middle of it, murmuring cool things concerning drinks in an iced voice. Exquisite white linen suits of clothes, the only blot on whose spotlessness was the nigger inside them, ambled up and down the line, like field-marshals reviewing the household cavalry, armed humanely with lemon squashes and whiskies and sodas.
The gardener, Mrs. Rust, the suffragette, and Courtesy enlisted in this force, and sat in a state of torpor only partially dispelled by luncheon, until Mrs. Rust began to look herself again. Her hat straightened and elevated itself to its normal position, and perched upon her hair like a nest of flowers on a ripe hay-field. The curls dried up like parsley after rain.
Little by little the other tourists regained consciousness, and with much show of energy set forth to the nearest buggy stand.
At about five, Courtesy, who was never happy unless she was moving with the crowd, became restless.
“Let’s take a buggy and go back to the wharf,” she suggested.
“We will hire a four-wheeler and return to the pier,” said Mrs. Rust in a contradictory voice.
Buggy or four-wheeler, there was only one sort of vehicle to be found in Port of the West. They manned the nearest conveyance and quibbled not over its title.
“It would be frightful if we missed the boat,” 111said Courtesy, who always said the thing that everybody else had already thought of saying, but rejected.
For the Caribbeania had begun raking the atmosphere with hoarse calls for its dispersed passengers.
But at the wharf the launch was still fussily collecting the mails.
There was a flame-coloured azalea leaning gorgeously out of the shade of the eaves of a customs house. It was Courtesy’s colour—so obviously hers that Courtesy herself unconsciously answered its call.
“Ou—I say, that colour,” she said, and ceased, because she could not voice the echo that streamed from her heart to the azalea’s. It bent towards her like a torch blown by the wind.
“It’s autumn,” said the gardener. “And that azalea is the only thing that knows it on the island.”
“Good,” commented Mrs. Rust. “All this green greenhouse rubbish has no sense ...” she waved her hands to the palm trees that plaited their fingers over the sky in the background.
“Autumn, I think ...” began the gardener, addressing the azalea, “autumn runs into the year, crying, ‘I’m on fire, I’m on fire ...’ and yet glories all the while; just as I might say, ‘This is passion, this is passion ...’ and so it is passion, and pain as well, but I love it....”
“What a funny thing to say!” said Courtesy. “Do you say that sort of thing by mistake, you 112quaint boy, or do you know what you’re talking about?”
“My lips say it by mistake,” said the gardener. “But my heart knows it, especially when I see—a thing like that. Otherwise, why should I have become a gardener?”
He looked round for the suffragette to see if she had caught this spark out of his heart, and whether the same torch had set her alight. She was not there.
“Come now, everybody,” said Courtesy. “The launch’ll be starting in a minute.”
“But the suffragette’s not here,” said the gardener.
There was an instant’s blank as heavy as lead.
“Stuff and nonsense,” said Mrs. Rust. “I can’t wait here all day. If she wants to moon around and miss the boat, let her. I am going.”
She gave a hand each to two niggers, and sprang like a detachable earthquake into the launch.
“I think I ought to wait,” said Courtesy. “She’s a little shaky after yesterday, and you’re such an irresponsible boy, gardener. She may have fainted, while we were looking the other way. Or she may be in that crowd buying souvenirs.”
The gardener looked in the crowd for that well-known round hat with the faded flowers. But he knew that she would never buy a souvenir.
“You jump in, gardener. I’ll wait,” said Courtesy. “Perhaps there’ll be another launch.”
113“Lars’ launch, missis, please,” said one of the mariners of the vessel in question.
“Come at once, girl,” said Mrs. Rust’s harsh voice from the stern.
Courtesy wavered.
Mrs. Rust made a great effort. She became extremely red. “Don’t you understand, girl, you must come?” she shouted. “I can’t spare you.... I like you....” She cleared her throat and changed her voice. “Can’t sew ... buttons ... companion ... large salary....”
But the first part of the sentence reached Courtesy’s sympathy. She jumped into the launch.
The gardener stood on the hot wharf, and his heart turned upside down. His plans were stripped from him once more by this disgracefully militant creature who had broken into his life. He hovered on the brink of several thoughts at once.
“The little fool. The dear little thing. The little devil.”
He ran round the customs house. He felt convinced that it was interposing its broad person between him and his suffragette. He could almost see it dodging to hide her from his sight.
“I shall find her in a minute,” he thought. “I’m a lucky man.” He thought that his hopes were pinned to the probability of arriving on the Caribbeania in time.
On the brown grass space there were only the goats. The gardener was astonished not to see the 114fleeing form of a woman making for the town. Things can be done very quickly if they must. The gardener was at the corner of the main street before he had time to think another thought. He looked back, and saw in one fevered glance the launch only just parting from the shore.
“Have you seen a lady in white with a brown hat?” he asked of a policeman.
“Yes, please, sah.”
“Which way?”
The conversation was from beginning to end above the policeman’s head. But such a very hot buckra man must be humoured. At random the policeman pointed up the main street. The gardener was indeed a man of luck, for that was the right direction.
The main street on a fiery afternoon was as long as eternity, but in certain states of mind a man may bridge eternity in a breath, and not know what he has crossed.
He was on the race-course. He looked back and the launch was approaching the Caribbeania in the far-off bay, like a dwarf panting defiance at a giant.
When he was half-way across the race-course, he saw a white figure surmounted by a brown straw hat, in the Botanical Gardens, in the shade of a banyan tree.
The suffragette had lighted a cigarette in a laborious attempt to appear calm, but she pressed her hand to her breast as though she had been running. 115“I’m not coming,” she shouted, when he was within shouting distance.
He vaulted the railing of the race-course, and the railing of the garden. “What a bore!” he said. “Then I must stop too.”
“Why?” she asked.
Very far off, the launch was nestling at the side of the Caribbeania.
“For reasons I cannot be bothered to repeat to you.”
She veiled herself in a cloud of smoke.
“You know,” he added, “this is a repetition of the Elizabeth Hammer episode. Pure hysteria. Darling.”
There was an appreciable pause.
“Why, you’re right. So it is,” said the suffragette.
“Come on,” shouted the gardener. “We can catch it yet.”
“If I come,” she said, “it will be strong, not weak.”
“Of course,” said the gardener. “Come on.”
“It would be much easier to stay here.”
“Oh, much,” panted the gardener. “Come on, come on.”
So they ran, and on the way back they discovered how interminable the main street was, and how relentless is the sun of the West Atlantic. But when they reached the wharf, the launch was still clinging to the liner.
116“A guinea,” shouted the suffragette, who was experiencing the joys of very big-game hunting, “to the boatman who can get us up to the Caribbeania before she starts.”
She spoke in the voice of one accustomed to speaking in Trafalgar Square, and everybody understood her. A boat practically cut the feet from under them before she had finished speaking, and in it they splashed furiously out into the bay.
“We shall catch it,” said the gardener, rowing energetically with one finger. “I’m a man of luck.”
He was posing as one who would not utter a reproach. It was a convenient pose for all concerned. When they were about half-way, the suffragette said, “You know—it takes a little courage to admit hysteria.”
“Of course it does, my dear,” said the gardener. “I wouldn’t have done it for the world.”
Presently they were within bare shouting distance of the whale which had threatened to make Jonahs of them. A liner’s farewells are like those of a great many women I know, very elastic indeed.
“You’ll do it,” shouted a voice from the high boat-deck.
They did it. The Captain shook his finger at them from the bridge.
“What happened?” asked Courtesy, meeting them on the main deck with a shawl to put round the suffragette. Some women seem to think that a 117shawl, or a hot bath, or a little drop of sal-volatile are equal to any emergency under the sun.
“She didn’t know that was the last launch,” said the gardener, still posing as the magnanimous defender.
“Yes, I did,” said the suffragette.
“She was buying a souvenir round the corner,” persisted the gardener.
“No, I wasn’t,” contradicted the lady. “I made up my mind not to come back to the Caribbeania.”
“Ou, I say, how killing of you!” said Courtesy. “But he changed your mind?”
“No. I overcame it.”
“You quaint mite,” said Courtesy.
The gardener’s pose momentarily ended here, for he was stricken with whirling of the head and sickness, after running in the sun. Although there was a touch of martyrdom about it, it was not a dignified ending to a really effective pose. He had to seek the comfort of Hilda in his cabin.
Hilda had three flowers now, and they had cost her her independence, for she leaned upon a stick. But among her round green leaves she held up bravely her trinity of little gold suns.
The gardener being thus removed, Courtesy and the suffragette sat on the promenade-deck, and discussed the day. The suffragette was astonished to find herself in this position, being addressed as “my dear,” by a contemporary. “Just like a real girl,” 118she thought, for as she had never passed through the mutual hair-brushing stage with other girls, she always expected to be hated, and never to be loved. She found it rather delightful to have Courtesy’s hand passed through her arm, but she also found it awkward, and hardly knew how to adjust her own arm to the unaccustomed contact. The very small details of intercourse are very hard indeed to a snake, though pleasant by reason of novelty.
“So you didn’t want to come back, and he bullied you?” said Courtesy, frankly inquisitive. “After all, my dear, that’s what women are for.”
“It is NOT!” shouted the suffragette. “Women are not born with a curse on them like that. I chose to come back; I made a great effort, and came.”
“O Lor’!” said Courtesy, and tactfully changed the subject. Courtesy’s tact was always easily visible to the naked eye. “My dear, I must tell you what a killing interview I had with old Mrs. Rust. She clutched my arm when I got into the launch—think of that, my dear—and presently she said in a gruff sort of frightened voice, as if she was confessing a crime, ‘Miss Courtesy, I refuse to part with you; you are what I have been looking for; you are not to pay any attention to anybody else—do you hear? I forbid it.’ I screamed with laughter—on the quiet, you know. I said, ‘Do you want me to be a substitute for Hammer, Mrs. Rust?’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘Hammer was only a stopgap; I was keeping the position open for a person like you. I will 119give you two hundred a year if you will promise to stay by me as long as you can bear me’—and then she shouted as if she had made a mistake, and thought that noise could cover it—‘I mean as long as I can bear you.’”
“So what did you answer?” asked the suffragette.
“My dear, two hundred a year—what could I say?”
“But what were you originally going out to Trinity Island for?” asked the suffragette. “To visit relatives, weren’t you? What will they say?”
“Oh, they won’t say anything—to two hundred a year. I was really only coming out as a globe-trotter. I loathe colonial relations.”
The matrimonial motive was the skeleton in Courtesy’s cupboard.
“But wasn’t it killing, my dear?”
“Very killing,” agreed the suffragette gravely. She felt like one speaking a foreign tongue.
And then it occurred to Courtesy that she was squeezing the arm of one who, after all, had a criminal disregard of convention. She withdrew her arm, and proceeded to try and storm that house which she considered to be built on sand.
“I wish I could understand what you are up to, my dear?” she said. “Can’t I persuade you to leave that naughty gardener, or to marry him? You needn’t run away, or drown yourself or anything, just say to him, ‘This won’t do.’ I should be 120frightfully glad if I could feel you were all right. Why don’t you get married on landing?”
“We don’t want to,” said the suffragette, who was too inexperienced in the ways of The Generation to feel offended. “We neither of us ever pretended to want to.”
“Ou yes, of course I know the catchwords. I know you just came together as friends, and didn’t see any harm in it.”
“But we didn’t come as friends—we came as enemies.”
“Yes,” said Courtesy, with a furrowed brow. “But really, my dear, enemies don’t do these things.”
“They do. We do.”
“But, my good girl, you must know—you can’t be as innocent as all that.”
“Great Scott, no!” said the suffragette. “I’m not innocent!”
“Then am I to conclude,” said Courtesy, suddenly frigid, “that you fully realise the meaning of the life you are leading?”
“You are to conclude that,” said the suffragette, in a voice of growing militancy. “I realise its meaning much more fully than you do. I shall leave the gardener directly it becomes convenient to me to do so. For an utter stranger his behaviour has certainly been insufferable.”
“O Lor’!” exclaimed Courtesy, falling back upon her original line of defence. “An utter stranger 121... I must go and button Mrs. Rust into her evening gown.”
There is something very annoying to a woman in being accused of innocence. The suffragette was quite cross.
For the next two days the Caribbeania threaded her way cautiously between shore and shore. The horizon was frilled with palm-embroidered lands. Dry, terrible-looking beaches, backed by arid brown hills, marred the soft character of those calm seas. It was as if the Caribbeania saluted the coast of South America, and South America turned her back upon her visitor. At two or three ports in that forbidding land the boat touched. Drake had passed that way, and had left his ill-gotten halo upon the coast, but that was the only life of the land. The flat, dead towns seemed brooding over flat, dead tragedies.
It was almost a relief to the travellers when the last night fell, and the ship was enclosed in darkness and its trivial insularity. There was a great dance that night. Captain Walters called it the Veterans’ dance, because the chalked deck was thick with non-combatants, who had determined to cast care aside and join with youth, because after all it was the last night, and one would never meet any of these people again. As a matter of fact, there was no youth to be joined, for youth sat out and began its farewells. Half a dozen hours is not an over-large allowance 122of time for farewells between people who have known each other three throbbing ocean weeks.
The suffragette actually danced with the chief engineer. He always danced with ladies who could not find partners, being a conscientious young man of forty-two, with a brand-new bride at home. The suffragette knew well that by his courtesy she was branded as one undesired, and she laughed her invisible cynical laugh.
I think men are akin to sheep as well as to monkeys, and the theory only needs a Darwin to trace the connection. I have yet to meet the man who, where women are concerned, does not follow in the track of others of his kind. I think that very few men conceive an original preference for a woman unbiassed by the public tendency.
Directly the gardener saw the suffragette dancing with the chief engineer, he wondered why he was not dancing with her himself, although she danced rather badly. The gardener felt a mysterious call to go and monopolise her directly she was at liberty.
“I’m glad you have come to talk to me,” said the suffragette. “Because I shall go on shore early to-morrow, and should like to say good-bye to you.”
“Good-bye?” questioned the gardener.
“You didn’t really expect me to stay with you, did you?” she asked.
“Yes,” said the gardener, and thought how peaceful and how stupid life would be without her. “I shan’t dream of letting you go.” And even while 123he said it, he experienced the awful feeling of being powerless to make his words good. He realised for the first time how indispensable to a man’s sight are soft straight hair that has never committed itself to any real colour, and a small pointed face, and quick questioning eyes. But there was something indescribable, peculiar to the suffragette, that made it impossible to humble oneself before her. She was anything but a queen among women; no man had ever wished to be trodden under her feet, though they were small and pretty. Plain people often have pretty hands and feet, a mark of Nature’s tardy self-reproach.
To any other woman, the gardener might have said, “Please, my dear ...” with excellent results. He had a good voice with a tenor edge to it, and he could pose very nicely as a supplicator. But not to the suffragette.
“I have not brought you all this way just to let you return to your militant courses,” he said, with a sort of hollow firmness. “I owe a duty to Trinity Island, after all, now that I have imported you.”
The suffragette smiled and said she was tired and would go to bed—good-bye.
The gardener said Good-night.
The Caribbeania and the first ray of the sun reached the Island simultaneously next morning. When the gardener came on deck at half-past seven he found himself confronted by the town of union, backed by its sudden hills. The Caribbeania, like a 124robber’s victim, ignominiously bound to the pier, was being relieved of its valuables. The air was thick with talk. On the pier the over-dressed representatives of British rule, in blue serge and gold braid, rubbed shoulders with the under-dressed results of their kind tyranny, in openwork shirts and three-quarters of a pair of trousers.
“Your wife went off early,” said the fourth officer to the gardener. “I asked her whether she were eloping all by herself, and she said you knew all about it.”
“Thanks,” said the gardener curtly.
You will hardly believe me when I tell you that his first conscious thought after this announcement was that he had no money to tip the steward with. The suffragette meant a good deal to him, and among the things she meant was temporary financial accommodation.
I hope that you have noticed by now that he was not a money-lover, but a steward was a steward, and this particular steward had been kind in improvising a crutch for Hilda. Any assistance from the suffragette was, of course, taken as temporary: independence was one of the gardener’s chronic poses. He meant to change it from a rather hollow dream into reality on arriving on the Island; he supposed that he would be able to turn his brains into money. He considered that no such brain could ever have landed at union Town. Its price in coin, which had been rather at a discount in the stupid turmoil of London, 125would be instantly appreciable under this empty sky. His pose on the Island was to be The One Who Arrives, in capital letters.
He went down to his cabin to pack his little luggage. He had nothing beloved to pack now; men’s clothes seem to be inhuman things without a touch of the lovable, and they were all he had. For Hilda was dead. For the last week of her life she had been a little concrete exclamation of protest against her unnatural surroundings. One born to look simply at the sun, from the shelter of a whitewashed cottage wall, with others of her like jostling beautifully round her; a fantastic fate had willed that she should reach the flower of her life in a tipsy cabin, with a sea-wind singing outside the thick glass against which she leant. The gardener had given her a sailor’s grave somewhere near the spot in the Spanish Main to which I hope the spirit of Drake clings, for his mother-sea received him there. It was hardly a suitable ending for Hilda, but it was the best available.
The gardener set himself to put his scanty property together stealthily, and creep from the boat, that the stewards might not see him go. He had an unposed horror of ungenerosity. To him, as to most men, the tip was more of a duty than the discharge of a debt. He suffered keenly for a while from the discovery that there was no escaping from the stewards to-day, they were stationed with careful carelessness at every corner. Presently the siege was 126raised unexpectedly by the arrival of the boot-boy with a note.
“The lady left it, sir.”
It contained a five-pound note, and it was addressed in the suffragette’s small defiant handwriting.
Of course the hero of a novel should have thrown the whole missive into the sea. He should have struck an attitude and explained to the admiring boot-boy that such gifts from a woman could only be looked upon as an insult. But you must remember the gardener considered that the fortunes of the Island were at his feet. And he would not have gone so far as to pose at his own expense—not to speak of the steward’s. He put the note in his pocket, and went to the purser for change.
When his duties were discharged, he came on deck to collect any plans that might be in the air. It is a most annoying fact that theories will not take the place of plans. In theory you may be The One Who Arrives, but in practice you have to think about passing the customs and finding a cheap hotel and getting yourself a sun-helmet. I think the world has an antipathy to heroes; it certainly makes things very hard for them.
On deck Courtesy was sitting calm and ready. Her plans had been made for three days. She had only just stopped short of writing a time-table for the hourly career of herself and Mrs. Rust throughout their sojourn on the island. She had a genius for details.
127“The suffragette has disappeared,” said the gardener. A disarming frankness was one of his weapons.
“I’m jolly glad,” replied Courtesy. “I believe you owe that to me, you naughty boy. I gave her a bit of my mind about it the other day.”
The gardener uttered no reproaches. He felt none. For he had learnt by now that the suffragette would never be affected by a bit of anybody’s mind.
“What are you going to do?” asked Courtesy. “We are going to the St. Maurice Hotel for four days—Father Christopher told us of it—and at mid-day on Saturday we go up to the hills for a fortnight, and then we hire a car and tour round the Island, staying twenty-four hours at Alligator Bay.”
“I’m going to look for work,” said the gardener.
“Sugar or bananas?”
“Neither. Head-work.”
“Stuff and nonsense,” said Mrs. Rust. “Nobody on the Island ever uses their head except to carry luggage on.”
“That’s why I shall find work. There’s no competition in my line.”
“You funny ...” giggled Courtesy. “Isn’t he quaint, Father Christopher?”
For the priest was passing on his twenty-second circuit of the deck.
“Very droll, no doubt,” said the priest in the voice of a refrigerator, and continued to pass. He 128was very much annoyed with the gardener’s soul.
The gardener waited till he came round again before saying to Courtesy, “Besides, I have to look for the suffragette.”
“I hope you won’t find her this time,” said Courtesy. “Will you come to tea with us one day, and tell us which of your searches seems most hopeful. You see, now the suffragette’s gone, you are respectable for the moment, and I needn’t be afraid for Mrs. Rust’s morals.”
When Courtesy giggled, her hair laughed in the most extraordinary way. Everything she did was transmuted into something wonderful by that halo of hers.
“I’ll come to-day, if I may,” said the gardener, who had never mastered the art of social diffidence. “You’d better have me to-day, for I hope I shan’t be respectable to-morrow.”
Courtesy did not want him to-day. In her code there was only one programme for the first day in a strange land. It was made up of a visit to the principal church, the principal shop, the principal public gardens, and to a few “old-world relics of the past.” It did not include ordinary five-o’clock tea with a familiar figure. But, on the other hand, her invincible conventionality made it impossible for her to evade the gardener’s suggestion. Courtesy was content to suffer for her convictions. At any rate, you will notice that Mrs. Rust was not consulted.
“You may come,” Courtesy said. “At five. 129We are due back from the cathedral at a quarter to.”
Probably the reason why Mrs. Rust submitted to Courtesy’s tyranny from the first was that no other woman in the world would have done so.
The land reeled under the gardener’s feet as he arrived. The only comfort in parting with the sea after a long intimacy is that for the first day or two the land follows the example of its sister element. The gardener found more difficulty in walking straight along union High Street than he had experienced along the deck of the Caribbeania.
The morning was yet very young when he put his little luggage down at the bamboo-tree arch of a house that proclaimed itself ready to receive boarders at moderate terms. He relied much on impulse, and the little house, which was lightly built on its own first story, so to speak, beckoned to him. But only in theory, for when he mounted the flight of wooden steps, and, through the open door, saw the dirty living-room, seething with gaudy trifles, he knew that in practice it was better suited to his means than to his mind.
However, he had rung the bell. One has to pay penalties for acting on impulse. A woman with black wire hair, a face the colour of varnished deal, and a pale pink dressing-gown, appeared. Luckily she transpired to be the hostess before the gardener had voiced the fact that he mistook her for a drunken housemaid.
130“I want a room here,” began the gardener, who had never wanted anything less in his life. But the three pounds lay very light in his pocket.
“We can give you one,” said the lady, and took his portmanteau. She could have given him several, but not one worth having. She conducted him through one or two doors that led from the living-room. Each showed a less attractive bedroom than the one before, but the cheapest was barely within the range of prudence, as far as the gardener’s pocket was concerned. In a leaden voice, proceeding from a heart of lead, he concluded a bargain for the temporary possession of the least inviting. And when it was done, and the portmanteau deposited drearily in the middle of a dirty linoleum floor, he discovered that time had been standing still, and that it was hardly nearer five o’clock than before.
It was the first time he had realised the four thousand miles that lay between him and the kindly grey pavements of Penny Street. He remembered the look of the London lamps reflected in the slaty mirrors of London streets ... the smile of the ridiculous little griffin who sits on a pedestal at the top of Fleet Street, playing the ’cello with his shield ... the shrugging shoulders of St. Paul’s on tiptoe on the peak of Ludgate Hill ... the dead leaves blowing down the Broad Walk, in the rain....
There is no pose that saves you from that awful 131longing for the things that are no longer yours, and which you hated while you possessed.
“I said I was enough for myself. And I am not,” said the gardener, and hid his face in the mosquito net.
Strange things in barbaric colours made the garden outside a whirlpool. Sometimes these things say to you: “You are a very long way from home”; and you exult, and think This is Life. But sometimes they say again: “You are a very long way from home”; and you cry out, and think This is Worse than Death.
Now there are moral drawbacks about the posing habit. But there are also advantages, though possibly none deserved. For after three minutes of despair the gardener straightened himself, blinked, and began putting his spare shirt into a drawer that would not shut. He was posing as One Who was Seeing Life, and who was Making the Best of it. The vision that inspired this brave pose was the ghost of a pair of small haggard eyes, set in a short pointed face, eyes that cried easily and never surrendered. A thin unbeautiful ghost with clenched fists, and in the air, the ghost of a low and militant voice.
“I am not enough,” the gardener admitted. “But together, we are enough.”
He whistled a comic song tentatively. The Englishman never whistles or sings to suit his feelings. 132He dies to the tune of “Tipperary,” or goes to his wedding humming the “Dead March in Saul.”
There was no more life to be seen in that hot little room, even by one fixed in an optimistic pose. He emerged into the sitting-room, and through an opposite and open door he could see the pink dressing-gown, containing his landlady, heaving sleepily under a mosquito net. One of her bare feet was drooping under the net. At this he had to swallow down London again violently, and remember that he was Seeing Life, and that he was Luckier than Most.
Did you know that the surest way of ensuring luck is to be sure that you are lucky?
“Now I will find my suffragette,” he said, standing between the bamboos at the gate. And he expelled an entering misgiving that he was perhaps presuming on his luck.
It was curiously cool in the shade of the high cactus hedge that ran along one side of the way. A fresh breeze, like the unbidden guest at the wedding, conscious that it was not attired in character, crept guiltily in from the sea. The sun, which would have disclaimed even distant relationship with the cool copper halfpenny that inhabits English skies, fretted out the black shadows across and across the white street. The gardener thought painfully of many glasses of cold water that he had criminally wasted in England. He stiffened his long upper lip, and tried to look for new worlds instead of remembering the old.
133He went into the Botanical Gardens, and sat on a seat opposite the mad orchids. I think the Almighty was a little tired of His excellent system by the time He came to the orchids, so He allowed them to fashion themselves. For they are contrived, I think, and not spontaneously created like the rest.
On the other end of the seat were two children, so blessedly English that for a moment the gardener smelt Kensington Gardens. The girl wore very little between her soft neck and her long brown arms and legs, except a white frill or two, and a passion flower in her sash. The boy, more modest, was encased in a white sailor suit. Both were finished off at the feet with sandals.
Hardly had the gardener sat down when he was regretfully aware that he had sat by mistake on a pirate-ship in mid-ocean. The two commanders looked coldly at him from their end of the treasure-laden deck, and there was an awkward silence which somehow left the impression that much exciting talk had immediately preceded it on that vessel.
“I beg your pardon,” said the gardener. “I forgot to tell you that I am the prisoner you seized when you captured your last prize. There was a desperate resistance, but in spite of heavy odds, you overcame me.”
The boy, because he was a boy, looked for a second towards his mahogany-coloured Nana, who was staring an orchid out of countenance farther up the path. The girl, because she was a girl, looked 134neither right nor left, but straight at the gardener, and said: “All right then. But you mustn’t let your feet dangle into the sea. And you must be very frightened.”
The gardener restrained his feet, and became so frightened that the whole vessel shook. The boy continued to look doubtful, until his sister reminded him in a hoarse whisper: “It’s all right, Aitch, we were wanting somebody to walk the plank.”
In providing a willing villain, the gardener was supplying a long-felt want in pirate-ships. So thoroughly did he do his duty that when he was finally obliged as a matter of convention to walk the walking-stick blindfolded, and die a miserable death by drowning in the gravel-path, the pirate-ship seemed to have lost its point.
“Let’s betend,” said the lady-pirate, “that Aitch and me are fairies, and we touch you with our wand and you turn into a speckled pony.”
“Greatscod, no,” said Aitch; for there are limits to what a fellow of seven can betend in company. “Don’t let’s have any fairying, my good Zed. Let’s betend we’re just Aitch and Zed, and we’ll show the prisoner the Secret Tree.”
So they set off, and the Nana, who might as well have been a Nanning-machine for all the individuality she put into her work, trotted behind them.
The Secret Tree was one of those secrets that remain inviolate because it occurs to nobody to lay them bare. It was an everyday little palm tree, exquisitely 135bandaged by Nature in cocoanut matting; it was very fairy-like, and when you looked up at its fronds in their infinite intersections against the sky, you saw a thrill, like the thrill you see on a cornfield curtseying in the wind, or in the light moving across watered silk. In one of the folds of the palm tree’s garment a White Pawn, belonging to Aitch, had made his home. He lived there for days at a time—the gardener was told with bated breath—and the park-keeper never knew he was there. At night he saw the fireflies light their lamps, and heard the swift slither of the fearful scorpion; once he had reported an adventure with a centipede three times his own size. That pawn was the epitome of People Who Stay Up Late At Night, and Are Not Afraid of the Dark. A super-grown-up.
On their way to the garden gate, each child held a hand of the gardener, and the automatic Nana walked behind. As they came out into the main street, the gardener thought that the houses looked like skulls—so white they were, and so soulless, and their windows so black and empty.
“Greatscod,” said Aitch, “what is happening to the church steeple?”
For it was reeling in front of them, to the tune of a paralysing open roar from underground.
Behind them the automaton blossomed madly into life, Nana fled shrieking back into the garden.
Those two things happened, one by one, like sparks struck out of a flaming experience. Then everything 136happened at once, and yet lasted a lifetime. There seemed not a second to spare, and yet nothing to be done.
The gardener felt unspeakably terrified, his mother earth shot away from under him, truth was proved false. He discovered that he had seized Aitch and Zed, one under each arm; and later on—his memory having vaulted the blank—he found that he was lying on them in the gutter, and that Aitch was yapping like a dog. Zed was crying, “Mother, Mother.” And the gardener, with a quick vision of some one watering a cool English herbaceous border, also said, “Mother, Mother.”
After a while a green beetle ran past his eye, and he recalled the moment, and raised himself upon his hands and knees. A fire of pain burnt him suddenly, and he turned his head and saw a pyre of twisted iron posts heaped upon his legs.
The air was thick with strange sounds, muffled as if from a gramophone. Some one quite near, but unseen, was shouting, “Oh, Oh,” as regularly as a clock’s chime. There was a rending wheeze behind them, and the gardener looked round in time to see a palm tree sink with dignity into a trench that had been gashed at its feet. But that might have been a dream.
He felt absolutely sick with horror. His head seemed as though it were all at once too big for his skin. His whole being throbbed terribly in a sort 137of echo of the three throbs that had laid life by the heels.
Yock—Yollock—Yollock. A pounce, and then two shakes, like a terrier dealing with a rat. Why had one ever trusted oneself to such a risky crumb of creation as this world? The gardener lost himself in littleness. And presently found that he had insinuated himself into a sitting position, and was feeling very sick indeed.
“That was an earthquake,” remarked Zed, with the truly feminine trick of jumping to foregone conclusions. And she burst into tears, wailing still, “Mother, Mother.”
“It is funny we should both have thought of her,” observed the gardener, forgetting that there was room for more than one mother in this tiny world. His eyes were fixed on a thin and fearful stream of blood that was issuing from between two bricks in the mass of miscellany that had once been a house. “Blood—from a skull?” he thought, and fainted.
For centuries his mind skirted round some enormous joke. It was so big that he could not see its point, and then again it was so little that he lost it. At any rate it was round, and turned with a jovial hum.
Later on he was aware of the solution of a problem which he felt had been troubling him all his life. What colour was the face of a nigger pale with fright? It was several colours, chiefly the shade of 138a wooden horse he had once loved, but mottled. But the whites of the eyes were more blue than white, they shone like electric light. With an effort he fitted the various parts of his mind together.
“Hullo, constable,” he said in a voice he could not easily control. “This is a pretty business, isn’t it?” And he tried to rise, and to whistle a bar or two, in an effort to assume the pose of the hero who trifles in the face of death. But he could not rise. He was pinned to the pavement by a leg that seemed somehow to have lost its identity.
It is not in the least romantic to be hurt. There is something curiously dirty in the feeling of one’s own pain, and in the sight of one’s own blood, though wounds in others are rather dramatic.
Now Courtesy was a person who, without ever trying to be sensational, was often unexpected by mistake. Coincidence seemed to haunt her. Out of the hundred streets that lay shattered in union Town that afternoon, she chose the one in which the gardener lay, and, accompanied by the priest, she bore down upon that unheroic hero, laden with brandy and bandages. The gardener saw her large face, frank as a sunflower, between him and the yellow sky.
The priest was quite obviously a saviour. You could see in his eye that he was succouring the wounded. You could hear in his voice as he addressed the terrified hotel porters who followed him that he was busy rising nobly to an emergency.
139“Why, gardener,” said Courtesy, in the tones of one greeting a friend at a garden party. “You here? I was wondering what had become of you. Now what’s the matter with you?”
She poured him out some brandy, as though it were the ordinary thing for a lady to offer to a friend in the street. And the gardener’s world regained its feet, he wondered why he had been so frightened.
“Poor little mites,” said Courtesy to Aitch and Zed. “They won’t forget this in a hurry, will they?”
There is something very comforting in the utterly banal. That is why the instinct is so strong in good women to make you a cup of tea, and poke the fire, when you are crossed in love.
“But if she had been the suffragette ...” thought the gardener. He knew quite well that the thing would not have been so well done, had it been the suffragette. He was fully aware that the operation of having his leg put into improvised splints, and of being lifted upon a door, would have been much more painful, had it been accomplished by the little nervous hands of the suffragette, instead of the large excellent hands of Courtesy.
It is discouraging to those of us who have spent much money on becoming fully efficient in first aid and hygiene and practical economy and all the luxuries of the modern female intellect, to find how perfect imperfection can seem.
140“Thank you—you little darling,” said the gardener with his eyes shut, when, after a few spasms of red pain, he was safe upon the door. White-clad hotel porters stood like tombstones at his head and feet.
“Lor’ bless you,” said Courtesy. “Take him to the St. Maurice, porter. It’s the only place left more or less standing, I should think.”
“It is not,” said the priest. “Excuse me, Miss Briggs, there are thousands in this stricken town in need of our help, and I should prefer that only the gentler and worthier of the sufferers should come under that roof. There are many excellent resting-places where our friend here would be far more suitably placed. You ought to know his character by now, and you must think of your own good name.”
“Rot,” said Courtesy. “What do his morals matter when he’s broken his leg?”
“Remember you are also succouring these innocent children,” persisted the priest. “Would you have them under the same roof?”
“Rot,” repeated Courtesy. “The roof’ll be all right.”
“Dose little children ...” said the policeman suddenly. “He covahed dem when dat house was fallin’. Verree brave gentleman. I chahnced to be runnin’ by....”
“Of course he did,” said Courtesy. “The St. Maurice, porter.” And seizing Aitch and Zed each by a hand, she started the procession.
141The High Street looked as if one side of it had charged the other with equally disastrous results to both. At different points in it, fire and heavy smoke were animating the scene. Distracted men and women panted and moaned and tore at the wreckage with bleeding hands. A little crying crowd was collected round a woman who lay nailed to the ground by a mountain of bricks, with her face fixed in a glare of terrible surprise. By the cathedral steps the dead lay in a row, shoulder to shoulder, with the horrid uniformity of sprats upon a plate. Courtesy lifted up Zed and called Aitch’s attention to the healthier distress of a little dog, which ran around looking for its past in the extraordinary mazes of the present.
The gardener, swinging along painfully upon his door, opened his eyes and saw the fires. To his surprise he recognised the house which could boast the highest flames. Its wall had fallen to disclose the shattered remains of the rooms in which the gardener had lately wrestled with despair. The bamboos and the gorgeous garden watched unmoved the pillar of fire that danced in their midst. There was no sign of the wire-haired woman.
But only one thought came to the gardener’s mind on the subject. “Why she will see that. It is a beacon from me to her.”
As a matter of fact she did not.
A pretty woman, crying in a curious laughing voice, ran into Courtesy’s arms. “My little babies ...” she quavered. “What a catastrophe. I don’t 142know where my husband is. There is a grand piano on my bed.”
“This is my mother,” said Aitch.
“Come along to the St. Maurice,” said Courtesy. “That’s where I am taking your babies to. Our piano there is still in its proper place.”
So they all followed the gardener.
“Somebody must go and find a doctor,” said Courtesy at the door of the St. Maurice. She looked suggestively at the priest.
But he replied, “I wash my hands of the matter, Miss Briggs. I consider this to be a judgment on that young man.”
“A judgment?” wept the mother of Aitch and Zed. “Why, what has he done?”
“He saved the lives of your babies,” replied Courtesy. “And anyway, a judgment needs a surgeon just as much as a simple fracture.”
“Yerce, yerce, only don’t ask me to help,” said the priest. “I prefer to succour those deserving of help.” And he went out into the street again. He seemed wedded to the word succour. It is a pose word, and fitted him exactly. Nothing but an earthquake could have made this worm turn. But the effect of the disaster on the priest was an obstinate certainty that there was a Jonah in the case, and that, as heaven was never to blame, the wicked were entirely responsible.
“Oh, Lor’,” said Courtesy. “I’ll have to go for a surgeon myself.”
143“I’ll go with you,” cried the mother of Aitch and Zed, whose name, for the sake of brevity, was Mrs. Tring. “I don’t know what has become of my Dally” (who was her husband).
“Somebody must sit with the gardener,” said Courtesy, when she came back from a successful search for an intact bed, into which, with the help of a housemaid, she had inserted the gardener.
“I will sit with him,” said the harsh voice of Mrs. Rust, as she rose from a seat where she had been sitting with an enormous paper bag held in a rigid hand. “I refuse to run about the streets with brandy. All the old cats are doing that.”
“Why, Mrs. Rust,” observed Courtesy, whose conventionality was not quite so striking after an earthquake as it had been upon the comparatively stable Atlantic. “I had clean forgotten that you existed.”
“Good,” said Mrs. Rust. “I was buying mangoes when the incident occurred. Perhaps the gardener would like a mango.”
“Perhaps he would. I am so glad to see that you don’t take the same view about the gardener as the——”
“I never take the same view,” barked Mrs. Rust. “Show me the boy’s room.”
So the gardener saw that poisonous hair advance along a shaft of sunlight that intruded through the broken shutter.
144“Your jug and basin are broken,” said Mrs. Rust. “Disgraceful.”
“Oh, there are several things broken in this town,” he said feverishly. “Windows and necks and a heart or two.”
Mrs. Rust sat deliberately on a chair and burst into tears.
“I was buying mangoes,” she sobbed stormily, “from a black man with bleached hair. And the whole of a shop-front fell out on him. One brick hit my toe. I looked at the man through a sort of cage of fallen things. It was as if—one had trodden on red currants.”
“What did you do?” panted the gardener. “How fine to live in a world where things happen.”
“I ran away,” said Mrs. Rust shakily. “I didn’t pay for the mangoes.”
“I would rather have had this happen,” said the gardener after a pause, “and have broken my leg, than have had an ordinary day to meet me on Trinity Island.”
After another pause, he added: “But I have lost the suffragette. And that is another matter.”
“Was she killed?” asked Mrs. Rust, steeling herself against the commonplace duty of condolence.
“Certainly not,” replied the gardener. “She is a militant suffragette.”
“Good,” said Mrs. Rust.
“How good the world is,” said the gardener, “to provide such excellent material. The sea, and the 145earthquake, and a fighting woman to love. Just think—an earthquake—on my first day. I am a man of luck.”
“You have broken your leg,” Mrs. Rust informed him.
“I have,” admitted the gardener rather fretfully. “But then everything has its price.”
“A good many other people have come off much worse,” said Mrs. Rust. “I’m not complaining, mind, but any other woman would say you were disgracefully selfish. A lot of people are dead, and a lot of other people’s people are dead....”
“The longer I live ...” said the gardener, from the summit of his twenty-three years, “the surer I am that we make a fuss which is almost funny over death. We run after it all over the world, and then we grumble at it when it catches us up from behind. It’s an adventure, of course, but then—so is—shaving every morning. Compare death with—love, for instance.”
He felt ashamed of this after he had said it, and tried to cover it with a little laugh which shook him, and changed into a yelp. After breathing hard for a little while he went on.
“We who have survived this ordeal have gained much more than we risked. I know that anything is worth a risk, the risk in itself is the gain, and to risk everything for nothing is a fine thing. Why otherwise do we climb Alps, or hunt the South Pole? In theory, I would run in front of an express train to 146save a mou. In theory I don’t mind what I pay for danger. That’s why I love the suffragette; she would risk her life for a little vote, and her honour for a bleak thing like independence.”
“Do you love the suffragette?” asked Mrs. Rust, who was at heart a woman, although she believed herself to be a neutral intelligence.
“I do, I do,” cried the gardener, suddenly and gloriously losing his pose of One Who Evolves a New Scale of Values—in other words, the pose of a Paradox. But his emotion awoke his nerves, and for a while, although the suffragette obsessed his imagination, pain obsessed the rest of the universe.
When Courtesy and the doctor came in, they found the gardener with a temperature well into three figures. So for some time Mrs. Rust was not allowed to see the patient.
By the time the gardener felt better, the earthquake, in the eyes of the townspeople of union, had become not so much of a horror as a disaster, a thing possible to dilate upon and even to lie about. The homeless were beginning to look upon homelessness as a state to be passed through rather than the end of things, the bereaved were discovering little by little that life may arise from ashes, and that sackcloth may be cut quite becomingly. Those ghosts of dead hope who still searched among the ruins were looked upon as “poor things” rather than companions in sorrow. Young nigger ladies, dressed in 147pink and silver, flaunted their teeth and their petticoats around the firemen who worked desultorily at the little gaseous fires that broke out among the lamentable streets. The one church that remained standing was constantly full. (The picture palace had met the fate it perhaps deserved.) There is nothing in the world so saved as a saved nigger. And nothing so lost as a lost nigger. After an earthquake it always occurs to these light and child-like minds that it is safer to be saved. The horse has fled from the stable, but the door might as well be attended to, and the padlock of salvation is not expensive. Fervent men and women throng the pews, shouting hymns down the back of each other’s neck, and groaning away sins they do not realise, to the accompaniment of words they do not understand. Those who have lived together in innocent sin hurry to the altar for the ring, which, to these harmless transgressors, is as the fig-leaf apron of Eden, and heralds virtuous tragedy.
When the gardener became well enough to resent being ill, he was allowed visitors, among whom was one, by name Dallas Tring, Esquire. This was a very honest man who, in spite of having an excellent heart, believed that he always told the truth at all costs. The only lie he permitted himself, however, was constantly on his lips. It was: “I take your meaning.”
It was obviously unnatural to him to be enthusiastic. 148It is to most very honest people. He came into the gardener’s room like an actor emerging from stage fright on to the stage.
“You saved my children from being crushed to death,” he said, and seized the gardener’s hands. “Thank you, thank you.”
“Oh, not at all,” murmured the gardener. “I pretty nearly crushed them to death myself. Have a whisky and soda.”
This last is the Trinity Island retort to everything, its loophole, its conversational salvation. The average Englishman takes several weeks to acquire the habit in the real Island style, but the gardener was always more adaptable than most.
Privately he did feel unreasonably conceited about the rescue. He would have admitted that the impulse to gather Aitch and Zed beneath his prostrate form had been unconscious, but he considered that unconscious heroism proves heroism deeply ingrained. Nevertheless, the people who voice your conceit for you are only a little less trying than the people who relieve you of the duty of being humble. One must do these things for oneself.
Mr. Dallas Tring was glad to have accomplished his duty, which was not spontaneous, but had been impressed upon him by his wife. Left to himself he would have said: “Say, that was good of you. I’d have been cut up if anything had happened to the kids.”
His wife not having warned him how to proceed, 149he began now to talk about the banana crops. It was only towards the end of the interview that he risked himself once more upon the quicksands of emotion.
“Look here, you know, it’s altogether unspeakable—what I owe you. Those are the only children we have. Aitch is a fine boy, don’t you think?”
“Fine,” agreed the gardener, relieved to be allowed a loophole of escape from, “Not at all.”
“You’re a fine boy yourself,” added Mr. Tring. “When you get well, will you come and help me?”
“What to do?”
“To start again.”
“Oh, yes,” replied the gardener. “I love starting again. What I never can do is to go on.”
After this the gardener, considered to be stronger, was allowed to see Mrs. Rust again. She was now but little better than a fretful echo of Courtesy.
Some people seem born to walk alone, and others there are who are never seen without a group behind them. Courtesy was as far a leader of men as can be compatible with having no destination to lead them to. She never knew what it was to be without a “circle.” Acquaintances were as necessary to her as air, and she used them, as she used air, innocently for her own ends.
Mrs. Rust never attained to the dignity either of being alone or the leader of a group, though she worshipped independence. She believed she had bought precedence of Courtesy for ￡200 a year.
150And on the occasion of this visit to the gardener, she believed that she was about to shock and surprise that wise young man.
“Do you know what I have done?” she asked, when she had to some extent overcome the nervous cautiousness of behaviour impressed upon her by the absent Courtesy.
“I do not,” said the gardener, whose gently irreverent manner towards her was his salvation in her eyes. “It’s sure to be something that any one else would be ashamed of doing.”
Mrs. Rust bridled. “It was partly to annoy you that I did it,” she said. “Because you dared to advise me not to. I have sent my son Samuel a cheque, so as to launch his hotel.”
“Rash woman,” protested the gardener. “If you knew your son Samuel as well as I do——”
“I know he is my son, so he cannot be altogether a fool.”
The gardener bent his thick threatening eyebrows upon her.
“Do you know what else I have done?” she continued.
“I tremble to think,” replied the invalid.
“I have advertised for your suffragette in the union Paper. Courtesy said what a mercy it would be if she should have got safely away and wouldn’t come back, so I advertised, just to show that I disagreed. I never knew her name, so I described her appearance....”
151“Her little size ...” he said eagerly. “Her small and hollow eyes. Her darling-coloured hair that always blew forward along her cheeks....”
“Well, I didn’t put it like that,” said Mrs. Rust.
“She had such wonderful little hands,” said the gardener, upon whom a sick-bed had a softening, not to say maudlin effect. “You could see everything she thought in her hands. They were not very white, but pale brown. You might have mentioned them. But she is obviously mine. Nobody could overlook that. Nobody could overlook her at all.”
“On the contrary,” said Mrs. Rust, “she is a perfectly insignificant-looking young woman. And I am sure that she would strongly resent your describing her as though she were a dog with your name on its collar. She had sensible views about women.”
You have been intended to suppose all this time that the suffragette had succumbed to the earthquake, but as she is the heroine—though an unworthy one—of this book, I am sure you have not been deceived. Loth as I am to admit that a friend of mine should have been so near to such an experience without reaping the benefit of it, I am obliged by tiresome truth to confess that she was never aware of the earthquake as an earthquake at all.
She was in the train when it happened, a little Christian the Pilgrim, making her way through many difficulties up to the Delectable Mountains. Far off they stood, defying the pale sea and the pale plains, 152shadowed mountains, each with its cool brow crowned by a halo of cloud.
The train service in Trinity Islands is not their chief attraction. First, second, and third class alike may watch the vivid country from the windows, otherwise there is no compensation for rich or poor. The price of a first-class fare is supposed to guarantee your fellow-passengers matching yourself as nearly as possible in complexion; it also entitles you to a deformed wicker chair in a compartment that a cow would appeal against in the Home Country. The wicker chair, unsettled by its migratory life, amuses itself by travelling drunkenly around the truck, unless you lash yourself to the door-handle with your pocket-handkerchief, or evolve some other ingenious device.
The suffragette was always without inspirations in the cause of comfort. She was a petty ascetic, and never thought personal well-being worth the acquiring. Her body was an unfortunate detail attached to her; she resented its demands, and took but little more care if it than she did of the mustard-coloured portmanteau, another troublesome but indispensable part of her equipment. She put her body and the portmanteau each into a wicker chair in the train, and promptly forgot how uncomfortable they both were.
(There is much fascination in the big world, but I think the most wonderful thing in it is the passing of the little bubble worlds that blow and burst in many 153colours around you and me every minute of our lives. In a ’bus or at a ball, in a crowd around a fallen horse, meeting for a moment as reader and writer of a book, or shoulder to shoulder in church singing to a God we all look at with different eyes, these things happen and will never happen exactly that way again. How I wondered at the cut of your moustache, O stranger, how I wondered at the colour of your tie.... But your little daughter with the thin straight legs and the thin straight hair pressed to your side, her glorying face filled with the light of novelty, and prayed that drive to heaven might never cease. And next to you was the girl who had just disc............